


Interzone

by mad_like_a_lynx



Category: Banana Fish (Anime & Manga)
Genre: 1980s, Alcohol, Alternate Universe, Ash is still making bad decisions, Drug Addiction, Drug Use, Ghosts, Hitchhiking, Hospitals, Implied Sexual Content, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, M/M, Magical Realism, Mild Sexual Content, Period-Typical Homophobia, Road Trips, Shorter is a traveling punk rocker, Teen boys being gross, Vietnam War, Violence
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-06-29
Updated: 2020-02-15
Packaged: 2020-05-29 14:04:34
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 5
Words: 35,947
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19401841
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mad_like_a_lynx/pseuds/mad_like_a_lynx
Summary: Shorter is on his way to California for his sister's wedding, trying his best to have as much fun as possible along the way. At a truck stop, he meets a boy named Ash.Sequel to One-Thousand Cranes.





	1. The Lot Lizard

**Author's Note:**

> This is a sequel, but can easily be understood without reading the previous story. Reading it would just help with understanding Ash's character a little better.
> 
> Cheers!

The tape hissed then clicked in the deck, and Shorter held his breath. Harlan, the old trucker who picked him up 100 miles north then brought him down just as many on Route 15, flipped the tape. He hummed, pressed play, and Shorter’s head pounded.

Fucking. Bee Gees.

He groaned. Harlan tapped his finger on the wheel and Shorter mused bitterly that life on the road was ninety percent boredom, ten percent Bee Gees.

That morning he had been in Washington DC, but now found himself about 30 miles from Raleigh. He hitched first with a group of punks he met at a show in DC, two cool dudes who dug Bauhaus and made every guy they smoked pot with write in fat sharpie on their jeans.

The plan had been to check out the 9:30 and see Fugazi, but his new friends took him to a sleazy underground club two blocks down with brick walls and a large steel doorway painted with graffiti. Guitar riffs shook the walls as the punks danced and screamed, and the graffiti blinked in the darkness as his lungs drank the smoke of some pretty dank weed. Here in this hole of rebellion, thick with the smell of leather jackets and cigarettes, he belonged, and in that chaos his mind found order. Shorter thought it was fucking awesome.

It was around 6 in the morning when he got dropped off at a pump in Virginia, head throbbing, muscles sore and throat raspy from a hard night’s party. The Chevy Blazer had been a good spot to grab a few hours of sleep, but his ass ached.

As the truck filled its stomach with gas, he got offered an opportunity to keep heading south towards Miami for the second time. The parties were great, the punk scene thick, and the girls beautiful, they said. But Shorter was heading to California and wasn't about to change his mind. He drew a middle finger on a knee of one pair of acid wash jeans then 'FUCK RONNIE’ on the other, and said his goodbyes.

For a good part of the morning, Shorter paced the lot looking for a ride to hitch. This proved fruitless, so he gave up and began the walk down an interstate of nothing. No houses, no shops, no lights; just a desert of pine trees and a shitty truck stop before 30 miles of ghosts on a two-lane road.

Harlan picked him up about two hours later. Around five miles down the road he heard the hum of the peterbilt and stuck out his thumb. The truck pulled over and let him hop into the cab. "Islands in the Stream” blared from the speakers, and Shorter grit his teeth, but it was hard enough to get picked up in a mohawk and leather jacket. He could deal.

Shorter learned that the peterbilt was carrying a large supply of hot sauce to a chain of fast food restaurants in Northern Mississippi. It was bizarre, to think that this huge-ass truck’s only purpose in the world was to haul gallons of mediocre hot sauce packets across the country.

He asked about it. "Oh, that's nothin'," Harlan said, his accent southern thick, "Five years ago and I was takin' drums full'a horse piss from Texas to Boston."

Other than his questionable music tastes, Harlan was alright. Apparently, he and his brother worked the road since they were kids, meeting up occasionally at a stop in Iowa.

"What you planning on doing once you get to Mississippi?"

Shorter hummed. "Finding another ride," he replied.

"Heading to Texas?"

"California, actually." His backpack was tossed to the bottom of the cab and he pumped the lever to roll down the window. "To see my sister."

"Visit?"

"Something like that." Shorter adjusted his sunglasses then leaned back into the seat. "She's getting married."

"Ah," the driver drawled. "Tell her Harlan says congrats."

He laughed, "Even I'm not telling her that. She's marrying a cop." Harlan chuckled while Shorter grinned.

A desert of hemlock and pine proved more monotonous than the tape hitting the same song twice. Shorter didn't realize that they had crossed the state line until he saw a gold Chrysler with North Carolina plates, driven by a man who had to be on the late side of 70. From the summit of the peterbilt, Shorter watched as he impressively beat himself to completion.

The dashboard clock read a little past noon when the truck exited the highway. Through the speakers, The Bee Gees were hitting the final chorus of "For Whom the Bell Tolls" for the fifth time, and Shorter was ready to bail. At the truck stop pump, he snapped off the seatbelt and grabbed his backpack.

"Gotta fill the tank," Harlan said.

"Actually, think I'm good here."

He looked surprised. "Still a way until Mississippi."

"I got some friends around here," Shorter lied, then threw the backpack over his shoulder. Fucking Bee Gees cost him his ride. "Thanks for the lift, man."

"Uh huh."

"Yo, you need a coffee or something?" The trucker waved his hand and refused, but accepted one of Shorter's cigarettes. "Later, then."

Here, his muscles could breathe, and Shorter rocked on his feet to loosen the tightness in his calves. The Doc Martens were beginning to feel tight around his toes, and he cursed himself for leaving his old Nikes back at the shelter. With a pair of ones he bought a Coca Cola, let the cap hiss, then sat on the curb.

Nothing in sight but fields and trees. Taking a swig of coke, he groaned. America was a whole lot of fucking nothing.

Problem was, finding a new ride would be difficult. Shorter never much cared what people thought of him until he needed a favor, and he suddenly felt very vulnerable in his thick boots and studded jacket. Long ago he learned that banking on the kindness of strangers in a mohawk often got one's own regard for society kicked in the balls.

He lit a cigarette and downed more coke.

God, it was getting fucking hot. He shrugged off his jacket, then noticed the woman.

She stared at him, and Shorter waved. Her gloved hands were unnaturally shaky, stout body tucked inside a dress of thick, white cotton. She was barefoot. The lot was soupy under the sun's heavy heat, but her toes remained still and flat on the hot asphalt.

Oh, shit. He rubbed his eyes under his sunglasses. It had been a few days since he'd seen any ghosts, and this one took him by surprise. Not that it mattered, ghosts never much did or said anything, and were surprisingly quite simple.

He watched the woman. Shorter thought she might have been trying to say something, but she made no noise; only slowly parted her mouth until it formed a tight "o", then disappeared.

A whistle, then a drag before he tapped the ashes of his cigarette into the now empty bottle of coke.

See, Shorter died once; fifteen, naive, and pissed that his death had been so disappointingly simple. Who the hell thinks that they are going to die at a traffic light in New Jersey, on the way to a fucking Bennigan's?

He could remember the sedan in the passenger seat window, metal body gaining size as it grew closer and closer. The car had shuddered then crunched at impact, screeching before flopping over like a fish on its belly. Then there had been nothing until there was something; he woke up in the hospital, only to learn how his parents had not.

These things worked in ways beyond anything he could ever hope to understand, but he knew some part of him stayed with the dead. The heart in his chest pumped thick and healthy blood, yet the ghosts stuck around. He could only hope that his next death would be something far more exciting.

A dead dog now lazily flapped its tongue in the lot. The right eye socket caved down deep into the skull, but its fluffy body wiggled in glee when Shorter noticed it there. The dog cantered up to the curb then sprawled at his feet, and Shorter smiled.

Boredom occupied his afternoon, a kaleidoscopic mix of exhaustion and failed attempts at finding a ride. Most truckers ignored him, to the point where he thought walking down the ramp back onto the highway might be the better option. The only thing keeping him here was his burning eyes and throbbing, angry feet.

Around high noon, a small group began to gather over by a trailer near the pumps. Having nothing better to do, he followed, the dead dog on his heels. 

The trailer stood newer than anything else on the lot, but still shined with rust and worn enamel paint."Truckstop Chapel" adorned the width of the rig in scratchy, stenciled letters. Shorter blinked. This was new, and no way was he going to miss this shit show.

The chapel proved bigger on the inside than one would expect, but that wasn't saying much. It was cramped, dark, and somehow hotter than outside. This made Shorter pause and contemplate leaving, but a big man in a red cap lined up to get in, forcing him to make his way down the pews of folding chairs.

A bored minister already stood at the front of the trailer, slumped beside a cheap, boxy television and a wooden mount. He smoked a cigarette as the seats began to fill, and Shorter grinned when their eyes locked.

"Yo," he said. The pastor diverted his gaze and ignored him.

In his seat, Shorter observed. This place was pretty tacky, even by his standards. Big rigs in chunky frames lined the walls, displayed between wooden crosses and paintings of little houses. Nadia once took him to an art fair where he saw stuff like this, kitschy pieces made from encaustic and cheap oil paint. He could imagine some trucker's sister completing a tawdry paint-by-number, then putting it in a frame.

"Yo," he said again, when a burly man wearing overalls and a Dallas Cowboys hat sat in the seat beside him. He received only a grunt in response, then looked at his feet to find that the dog had disappeared.

He studied a sign, "Jesus said: I am the way, the truth, and the life. John 14:6," when the last visitor entered the trailer. Shorter looked to see a young blonde boy in a black hoodie, shifting backward and forwards on the heels of his red hi-tops. He seemed to be exchanging words with the minister, a sort of coy, wolfish smile on his face. The pastor didn't share his amusement.

"Take your seat," he said sharply, then put out the cigarette. "I have a special sermon for you today."

The boy chuckled, almost sour. "Looking forward to it," he replied, then shoved his hands into the kangaroo pouch before beginning down the aisle. He caught Shorter looking and raised his eyebrows, a gesture he returned. This kid seemed too young to be a trucker, yet far removed from the usual sort he saw on the road. His face looked too soft, less road-heavy. Shorter watched as he slumped into a seat two rows down, next to a man with dirty blonde hair, then made the chair scratch.

"Good afternoon," the pastor began. "Now, let me tell you: I hope everyone came here today looking for something, because God gave me something to give to you, and that something's the truth."

Shorter glanced towards the blonde boy, who now had the slight edge of a smirk on his lips.

"There ain't no patch jobs in life. Life ain't a tire. You can't just patch up your soul and expect to go to heaven. Can a truck make it where it's goin' without gas? It's the same for a life without God. God is fuel for the soul."

Silence.

"There so many of you young guys, walkin' into these lots of temptation. You know what I mean. These parking lots, sometimes they are America's very own Sodom and Gomorrah. Women knockin on your doors," he made a knocking sensation with his hands, "takin' advantage of the weaknesses of the flesh. Then others," his eyes were on the boy now, "allow their explodin' hormones to pervert them. Temptation is out here. It's out here. Listen, you can go through life on an engine full of cheap diesel. But that premium, it keeps the engine clean, you hear me? Followin' God is a lot like that. You can follow his word, but still, have a dirty engine."

The kid laughed. All eyes in the trailer turned his direction, lips tight as he struggled to contain his humor. His bright green eyes were smiling.

"Where you think you'll be in two years, Ash?" The minister asked, his eyes hard, "Jail or hell?" The words were drawled until they rhymed. "You right with these?"

The boy, Ash, snickered again. Beside him, the man with dirty-blonde hair diverted his eyes away, only to look right at Shorter. He stilled.

With more animation, the pastor continued. "What about everyone else here? You sure you know where your soul is gonna go when you die?"

Shorter did know, but he wasn't going to say anything about it. Death was much more mundane than people made it out to be.

He yawned. The rest of the sermon seemed a perfect opportunity to doze, and behind his eyes, the speech became nothing but word salad. When the weariness began to fade, he opened them, then saw that everyone was preparing to leave. Ash stood, that same pleased look on his face.

"See you later, Father Graham," he said, and Shorter realized then that he had a northeastern accent. Boston, New York?

Ash batted his eyes. "See you at 6?"

The minister glared at him, said something about "hoe-moe-sexuality" and devils, then spit. "You're a nasty one," his voice was harsh and angry, "Do you have any shame?"

Ash smiled. "You know where to find me," he said, then left with the older blonde man on his heels.

Shorter followed them out, only to find Ash alone. Away from the darkness of the trailer he could see him better and realized that the kid proved more road-worn than he previously thought. The finger-combed hair was long and messy, body lithe and slender under his baggy hoodie. Ash wasn't short, but he seemed small in these clothes that were much too big for him, those black circles thick under his eyes. He looked kind of like a boyish girl.

It took Shorter a moment to register that Ash had said something.

"What?"

"I said, you got a cigarette? You look like you have a cigarette."

"Oh," Shorter reached into his jacket until he felt the box of smokes. "Sure. You need a light?"

Ash popped the cigarette between his lips and leaned in. That slender face smiled when the lighter clicked, cheeks filling with air. The cherry glowed as brightly as his eyes then faded.

"Thanks."

It had been melodic, almost playful, and Shorter half expected him to stick around and finish. Ash had other ideas though, and Shorter watched as he walked purposely down the gravel path before disappearing into a row of trucks. The man from before seemed to have caught up, and he too disappeared into the metal jungle.

With a hum, Shorter lit his own cigarette then realized that the dog was back. It looked up at him with a big brown eye and a wag of its fluffy tail.

"I'm gonna grab a bite then get outta here," he told it. “Looks like there's nothing here for me." He'd rather wait off the ramp for another few hours than sit through another sermon like that again, but at least he rested his eyes for a while. "Coming with?"

The dog followed him up to a row of glowing vending machines. Most of the slots were bare, making Shorter choose between a pack of Twinkies or a bag of Cheetos. He bought the Cheetos then returned to the curb, where he began to run the next legs of his journey through his head.

He still had about three weeks to get to California, but a full itinerary lived between those miles. About a year back, he and his buddy Lao used to talk about doing stuff like this, hitting the road and seeing what there was to see.

That plan never had a chance in hell after his little brother returned to New York, but Shorter wasn't about to waste this opportunity, and he had nothing waiting for him back north anyway. He aged out of the shelter two weeks ago and ached for something new. Maybe his sister had the right idea, going somewhere without seasons.

He rolled a Cheeto over his tongue, then the yelling began. Shorter leaned back on his hands and looked behind him. The sounds appeared to be coming from a forest green truck, made more obvious by the door ripping open with a loud clang. A black figure tumbled out with it, crumbling into a heap on the gravel. Laughter, then the heavy door slammed.

Shorter saw Ash now, pulling himself up onto his hands with his pants and underwear at his ankles. He looked angry, but the man inside must have said something because he looked up at the truck.

"Lizard needs a bath!" A voice drawled, and a bottle tumbled out, spraying Ash and the gravel with water. The rocks and his pale hair shimmered wetly in the sun, and he coughed. Shorter stood. He watched as Ash held up a strong middle finger through the laughter in defiance, then grabbed the bottle off the ground. With a movement that seemed much too practiced for Shorter's liking, he cleaned himself, pulled up his pants, then drank the rest. He threw the bottle back hard at the truck, it bounced off the window with a satisfying pop.

Ash seemed to mumble, then began to trudge slowly through the gravel. His anger had subsided, leaving him with what could only be described as something sad. He caught Shorter looking and stared.

"Hey," Shorter said and approached him. Ash didn't move but seemed unhappy about it.

"40-60-80." The words were sharp, and he wiped his face on the sleeve of his hoodie. His hands were bleeding.

"What?"

"Forty. Sixty. Eighty." Ash repeated, slowly and more deliberate.

It took a moment for Shorter to understand. Oh. /Oh./

"Shit! I'm not--" He waved his hands, eyes wide. "I'm not into that kinda stuff, man!"

The kid raised an eyebrow as if confused.

"I just wanted to see if you were okay. That was a nasty fall, yeah?"

Ash's shoulders seemed to relax, his eyes less hard. "Oh." He shrugged. "Yeah, that guy was an asshole."

Shorter would have used much stronger language to describe what that man did to Ash. 'Asshole' seemed much too soft. "I got a first aid kit in my bag," he decided on and pointed to his pack laying at the curb. "I'm a backpacker. Want to clean up?"

There was no answer, only footsteps as he simply followed Shorter back to the sidewalk.

"Did you just cut your hands?" He asked, and found the kit wedged between a pair of boxers and a mylar blanket. It was as simple as these kinds of things could get, but some alcohol wipes and Band-Aids would probably get the job done. Beside him Ash was splayed on the sidewalk, the sleeves of his hoodie pulled up to his elbows and his hair dripping. He folded the pantlegs of his jeans over his knees then studied the new marks there.

"Ow," Shorter said dumbly. The boy only rolled his shoulders, then hissed through his teeth when he began to wash away the blood."Where's your friend?"

Ash looked at him strangely. "What friend?"

"Kinda tall, had dark blonde hair, I think?" The alcohol pad stained red with blood, but the cuts looked clean, and he applied the first bandage. "I saw him with you at that circus. You know, the church thing."

The boy blinked slowly, and Shorter smiled nervously. Shit. Maybe he had read that situation wrong, and 'friend' was definitely not the right word for the relationship he had with this man.

"Ah, nevermind. Forget it." He applied the last bandage to his elbow, then moved away. Ash relaxed, letting his legs slump over the curb. "So, you live around here? People here seem to know you."

"No," he replied. He stretched, letting his bare, skinny white knees taste the sun. "I've only been here about a week."

"Got friends around here or something?"

He laughed. "No. I took a Greyhound bus down to Virginia, then got picked up off the highway. Was dropped off here."

"Planning on staying?"

"Does this look like a place where anybody could stay? There's nothing fucking here."

"Point," he replied pointedly. "I'm also passing by, just gotta find a ride. I'm on my way to California." He paused to see if Ash would inquire further. When he didn't, he continued anyway. "I'm gonna stop in New Orleans to get wasted and see some tits, then hit up a show in Dallas. Maybe check out the four corners before going down Route 66."

An uninterested grunt and Shorter smiled. "What about you, Vagabond? Going anywhere?"

"I'm going somewhere, I just don't know what the "where" is yet." He caught Ash staring at the water bottle sticking out of his pack and handed it over. Ash softly thanked him.

"So that why you're hanging out at truck stops?"

Ash took a deep drink out of the bottle then paused, staring down at it. "I'm also trying to find a ride."

"A week and you still haven't found one?"

He looked at Shorter as if he were prying into something that really was none of his business. Probably true, but Shorter would be lying if he said he wasn't feeling lonely after a kick-ass weekend that devolved into the company of Harlan and The Bee Gees.

"Well," Ash let the word sing, "let's say that a lot of the guys here don't take my currency. But the ones who do, pay." He sucked more water down his throat.

Oh.

Ash's lips let go of the mouthpiece with an exaggerated pop, then passed the bottle back to him. "Regret that it's been used by a faggot?"

Shorter laughed nervously. "Naw, man. It's all cool by me. I don't judge, got enough people judging me already." Green eyes looked him over curiously. In the lot, where the sun reflected for miles, they burned like jade fire. "Guess that explains why that pastor gave you a hard time."

A wide, knowing smirk spread across Ash's face. "Yeah."

"That was pretty shitty, what he did to you in there."

Ash hummed thoughtfully. "The first night I got here, he caught me giving a quickie to a guy who promised to take me to Florida."

Shorter raised an eyebrow. "And what? The fucking weirdo broke it up?"

"He asked me what I wanted more, a trip to Florida or a hundred bucks." His smile looked so wide now his face could crack. He licked his lips.

"Holy shit," Shorter breathed.

"Uh huh," Ash replied, still grinning. He leaned back on the sidewalk and looked at him. "I showed Father Graham what heaven looks like."

"I'm sure that you did."

Shorter put the kit back into his bag, then Ash spoke again, this time much more inquisitive.

"Hey," he started, almost quietly. "What's California like?"

Huh. He hadn't expected that. "Uh, I dunno. I've never been, but my sister says it's nice. Warm. But not warm like it is here, where it's all sticky."

"Is that why you're going? Your sister?"

"Yup. She's getting hitched in a few weeks."

Ash's eyes wandered, his face almost soft. Shorter watched as he looked up at the empty sky, starkly blue and bright. Then he sat up, his arm on his knee, looking right at him. He looked much younger now, much more vulnerable.

"Hey," he said again.

"Sup?"

"Do you think..." Ash paused, almost as if unsure he should say it. "Would you mind if I stuck around?" Wiping his face on his sleeve, he softly grinned behind it. "I can treat you well."

"I'm sure you can," Shorter said slowly.

"I can't pay you or anything," he sniffed, "and I don't have any cigarettes."

"Seriously, I don't... it's really okay, man."

He chose his next words carefully. "You can come along," he began, "But you don't need to do any of that stuff, alright?" He took out his cigarettes, offering the box to him. The kid seemed to hesitate, but took one, then slowly smiled.

"I'm Shorter, by the way. Shorter Wong."

Ash didn't miss a beat. "Your Ma give you that name?"

Shorter peeked at him from under his sunglasses and Ash giggled. "It's my road tramp name, what they call me. Stick around long enough and maybe you'll learn my real one."

"Hmm," Ash said. He put the cigarette between his lips, puckered, then narrowed his eyes playfully. His eyes glittered, and Shorter was surprised to see that his eyelashes were blonde too. "Well, my name isn't actually Ash. So, guess we're even."

Shorter looked for his lighter, found it, then clicked it open. "By the way, I do have one condition," he said, then snapped the spark wheel.

Ash looked at him inquisitively. "Yeah?"

"Tell me that you don't like The Bee Gees." The smile grew, then softened, and they both laughed.

"I like Joy Division," Ash said, and Shorter lit their cigarettes.


	2. The Passenger

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Ash and Shorter get revenge, steal a pumpkin, and find a body. Later, they learn how nothing good can ever come from a pumpkin.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A "lot lizard" is a slang term used to describe sex workers who work at truck stops.

* * *

Ash left New York City with nothing more than an old pocket knife, a roll of tape and a backpack.

The foxing on his hi-tops began to detach from the heel about twenty miles to Richmond. It took only one for the sensation of rubber clipping against his feet to get old, so he stopped to tape them up. After another three miles, the tape lost its stickiness, and he got used to the rhythmic slapping against the pavement.

If horror were a fly, one would be laying eggs in his brain. There exists a terror that ages beneath the skin, when one realizes the extent of their decisions; when no longer are the consequences hypothetical, but real.

Ash's reality seemed bleak. Route 15 was a tar desert, with neither direction nor purpose for him. Miles of black, heat, and nothing. Blisters spotted his toes, and bled through his shoes; if he breathed right, it was easier to bear the pain.

Two days ago, Ash had watched New York City disappear like a firefly into the dark. As the bus took him away from his life, he knew that when it was time to die, this memory would be the one imprinted under his eyelids.

On the edge of seventeen, Ash's life thus far could be considered short, yet even he recognized how the world's languages lacked a word to properly describe the experience of leaving New York City for good. Nothing else could compare.

That first night on his own, he made camp in an abandoned gas station. Old newspaper got stuffed into the hi-tops then taped up. Sleep happened on a pile of flattened boxes, with tight fingers wrapped around the pocket knife in his kangaroo pouch.

On the road, Ash learned about two kinds of loneliness: the kind where one cannot communicate, whether literally or metaphorically, and true, desolate loneliness. He discovered, in this boredom and company of self, that forgotten memories shook in his head like coins in a piggy bank. When the mind doesn't have anywhere else to go, it goes backward.

As a small child, he stayed up late to watch Night of the Living Dead with his brother. Griffin invited over some of his friends from school, and Ash glowed in that validation children get when one is recognized by the bigger kids.

He did not remember the movie scaring him, but being alone in this decrepit building made the bittersweetness of that random memory thick. In the stale, oily air of the gas station, he imagined the house he was born in, filled with the smells of popcorn, the warmth of blankets, and the safety of his brother. The trees howled in the wind like zombies.

By morning, the swelling in his legs made it impossible to leave, keeping him there a second day. In an aisle lay a busted pack of DIAL soap, and he used it to scrub his hair clean in a puddle. Flakes dried like snow in his hair. At night, he allowed himself to feel alone and cry a little.

A mile from the station, Ash found a stoplight.

It took two blowjobs to get from Virginia to North Carolina, two more for a week's worth of shower tokens and a Pepsi, then a packaged deal with Father Graham for the roll of bills that he spent at the little mart on the lot.

A pack of cigarettes, shampoo, toilet paper, a toothbrush and toothpaste, change for the laundry machine, and a bottle of gorilla glue went on the receipt. While the clerk checked the items, he stole a bottle of diet Pepsi and a bag of Doritos.

His body was filthy, but his mind felt good. No longer did he live for anybody or anything, Ash's world was freedom and dirt.

Glue and gravel tucked the heel of his shoe back into the rubber, and the cigarettes lasted only a few days. This place was deader than roadkill.

He kind of regretted taking that minister's money over the trip to Florida. The truckers who came by showed little interest in him, and the malaise felt thicker than the heat. Occasionally, Graham would proposition him, which at least proved to be a good distraction for an hour or so. However, the guy was a fucking basket case, pumping his hips while clutching that gaudy cross around his neck.

A few days in, he had enough shower tokens to keep clean and buy himself small meals, including a strangely domestic dinner with a trucker from Iowa. This man's mother baked her son a week's worth of meals before each long trek, and he shared a foil-wrapped plate of spaghetti with Ash.

The guy never once asked for a pair of hands down his pants, just told some stories about his mother and sister, who had recently given birth to a second son. He was hoping to see them on his way back to the Midwest and had a Fisher-Price box packed between the pallets full of canned vegetables.

The spaghetti was chewy and sickly warm, but it pleased his stomach. Ash found himself enjoying the trucker's company, even if he couldn't relate to or think of anything to say about his stories.

At the end of their meal, the trucker asked him if he knew what kids liked, which he didn't, then left with a shower token.

By the second day, Ash got to know the other girls. Boredom festered more plentifully than Johns on the lot, leaving a comfortable amount of time for a meet and greet.

The jewelry they wore proved easier to remember than their names. A lady with fake ruby bracelets often shared her lunch, while the woman with blonde hair and aqua earrings showed him creative ways to use a Pepsi bottle.

Ironically, the one name he could remember was Krystal. Ash liked her. She was an older woman with three children and a cocaine habit, and on his third night there she offered him weed. It was from Krystal that Ash learned about the ways Lizards used the CB radio to get more clientele, "catching flies," she called it, and the routines of the local cops.

Most who frequented the lot lived in a small town about seven miles down the road. Twice a day, the cops would stake out the stop, looking for a bust to pass time and meet quota. In a place where nothing ever happens, prostitutes were good hunting, and the Lizards on the lot called them Hawks. To Ash, this seemed fitting. He couldn't understand how these cops could repeatedly jail their neighbors.

It didn't take long for Ash to learn about the safe trucks, a designated hideout from the Hawks. Usually, they were owned by young truckers with a habit or the ones who had taken a liking to the girls.

When somebody spotted a Hawk, the CB radio let them know. Truckers wanted a Hawk around about as much as the Lizards did, and this procedure only added to the strange symbiotic nature of life on the lot.

Domesticity is not what Ash would have called hanging out in the safe truck on his first day, but by the second, it became the perfect word. In the truck, the Lizards became civilians, separate from this world of sex and aimlessness.

Ruby always had a beat-up Walkman covered in tape. One afternoon, she and Ash shared a pair of headphones and listened to songs on the radio. She giggled when he shyly admitted how he was unfamiliar with the pop music she liked to listen to. Other days, he would listen as she and Aqua talked about boys and a movie they wanted to see that weekend.

On his own, Ash would sit and think, the tin hot under his jeans. Often he thought about his mistakes, his regrets. Other times, he would sprawl out on the bed and stare at the ceiling.

He spent a good half-hour watching a spider. It danced and spiraled, casting a shadow on the far wall. For Ash, the future felt a lot like this spider and its web; fragile, sticky, slow to make, and full of flies.

"Why did you come out here, hun?" Krystal would ask. She was a good woman, one of the most genuine people Ash had ever met. This was not something he could easily say about most people.

She mothered him, either out of pity or that genuine kindness some people have. Every afternoon she bought him a Pepsi, and after a diet of soda and potato chips stuffed his intestines, a few pills. She called him "sweetie," "sweetheart" and "hun." This was not the first time somebody called him these names, but it was the first time he found them genuine.

As much as he liked her, he didn't want to tell her the whole story, so he settled on the barest minimum.

"People used to piss me off, but I don't have that problem anymore."

She hummed thoughtfully, the cherry of her cigarette glowing between her lips. "You like being alone?"

Ash knew alone and was used to alone. For a while, he got used to somebody, but now that somebody was gone.

Part of himself hated how naive he had been to get used to this. It was difficult to stomach, how easy making that boy an important part of his life turned out to be. He would never allow himself to do anything like it again; the pain hurt too bad, too fast.

"I like being free," he said.

"I'm sure your Mama is worried about you." Ash smiled.

"You laugh, but it's true." She touched her slightly swollen belly. "She probably thinks about you all the time. You should go home."

"I'll think about it," he lied.

She told him about her children. One was a budding artist who liked to draw stories about dinosaurs and Star Wars, while another played baseball. Later, she would admit that the reason she never made it to a single game was due to her extra hours, made to pay for her daughter's ballet lessons at the YMCA. Then she offered him a bump of coke, which he refused.

By the end of the week, the overwhelming frustration and boredom began to fester. Father Graham had a come to Jesus and started wagging his tongue rather than using it, and most fucks he got on the lot didn't end in the ride that he needed. Ash learned to ask for the money first.

Never could Ash have imagined that this frustration would come to an end because of a man like Shorter Wong. The first time he encountered him in that chapel, the guy seemed to be an eyesore, ridiculously foreign in this southern hellscape. His large body was rich with muscle and studded leather, hair thick with eggwhites and dye; a cluster of rebellion, all clumped together in a soupy aura of no-fucks energy.

(Later, he would learn how the leather was faux, that the brash exterior covered a kind, accepting soul, that these sorts of descriptions would have made him laugh.)

Ash liked Shorter almost immediately after meeting him; this was a surprise, as he hardly ever found himself liking anyone. When Shorter bandaged the scratches on his knees, his fondness grew. Somehow, in that tenderness, there was an intimacy not felt since another boy.

They talked shit about music. Everything Ash knew came from hanging around music shops, stealing, and the songs that came out of Dino's tape deck. Shorter was a lot more in the know, savvier, but Ash was happy that he could hold his own.

"Yeah, but what do you think of Iggy Pop?" Shorter mused. Whenever he asked a question, Ash became more attuned as to why somebody like him hid behind sunglasses. He preferred to keep what he was thinking behind a wall.

"I like Iggy," Ash said, even though he could only name one song. He searched his memory for the title, then it clicked. "The Passenger," he smiled.

"Fitting," Shorter lowered his glasses, then winked at him.

A heavy door slammed. The trucker from before, that asshole who had been perfectly fine with him when he was a Lizard around his cock, left the cab. Spots where he hit the gravel burned and Ash clicked his tongue. Shorter looked back at him, a smile on the edges of his lips.

"What?" Ash asked.

"Want to get back at that guy?"

Nervously, he chuckled. "Uhm. What?"

"Let's make that guy's day shitty. I even know how we could do it." Shorter jumped to his feet and motioned for him to follow. Ash, deciding that this could only be interesting, went along.

They were halfway to the mart when Ash figured out what Shorter was thinking. As they got closer, his smile grew wider, gaining fullness when Shorter walked exactly where Ash thought he would.

Near the store dumpster, stood a menagerie of bottles and milk jugs, all filled with urine. In the thick summer heat, pressure had burst open a few on the concrete. The smell intensified, and Ash wrinkled his nose as he laughed.

They threw piss on the guy's truck like a dog would a post. Shorter climbed up the cab and stuck his hand through the half-opened window, unlatching the door. When he got it open, the coke bottle full of urine went over the seats. He held his nose, the scent of ammonia thick, then shut the smell inside. Bottles and jugs bombed the cab like some kind of a trucker blitzkrieg.

If his life were a novel, Ash thought this would be poetic irony.

He couldn't stop laughing. The odor of the truck was so profound, it premeditated the area. He ended their vandalism by keying a smiley face into the cab with his knife, then watched as Shorter unzipped his fly and took a leak.

In the bathroom, their giggling continued. Ash fucked for money but never had he done something so ferociously primal.

"That was disgusting," he said, but his eyes smiled.

"He'll never get that smell out." Shorter pumped soap into his hands then rubbed them together. "Hey, I say we did some poor clerk a favor. Less piss jugs to empty."

Ash grimaced. It wasn't often that he preferred his own job description.

"Those things explode, you know," Shorter continued, "That's why they call 'em trucker bombs."

He went to say goodbye to Krystal. She kissed his cheek and told him to be safe, to think about what she told him. Ash said that he would. Ruby gave him a pack of cigarettes.

"Find something better than here," she said, then squeezed his hand.

That was how he came to be walking down a dead-ass interstate with Shorter Wong.

"It's hot as balls." The former had been complaining for a good thirty minutes, all the while Ash said nothing. "How the hell are you wearing that hoodie?"

He stared back blankly. "I don't have anything else to wear."

"Damn."

In the dreariness of tree-based monotony, he began counting cracks in the road, balancing on them like a tightroper. With a certain peppiness, this turned into hopping from one gap to the next.

Shorter's stare on him felt warm and keen, obviously trying to figure him out. It made Ash smile.

"Are you gonna ask me what I'm doing out here?" He said, not so much a question as a statement, then carefully stepped to the next crack. This one was further than the rest, and he leaped across the divide. "Everyone asks that."

"Figured you'd tell me if you wanted me to know," came the response behind him.

Ash hopped onto clean asphalt, then swayed a little into the road.

"Hey," Shorter said, "you should get out of the street."

"Like any car is gonna come through here for miles," he spoke with his tongue then gave Shorter a view of it. In a single gesture, Ash moved further into the middle of the road and spun.

He got a lot lonelier these past few weeks, but he gained something else. This body, once his but mostly others, felt more in control. For the first time in his life, he could do what he wanted. Every movement, every choice, was his alone.

He spun until he reached the other side. The road was like a sea between him and Shorter. Like water, the tar reflected in the sun and made Shorter's face glow. Ash waved, then began walking again. They walked like this for about ten minutes along the shore of the road. A large truck groaned passed them.

Ash watched the brush. Wildberries, some kind of finch in a tree, gravel crunching under his shoes. Then movement, and he paused.

The deer's ears were up, her white tail whipping back and forth. She stared back with large eyes, then took a step, studying him. Cautiously, she resumed nibbling the foilage, only to become aware of his presence again.

"Hi," he whispered.

An ear twitched, and with smooth grace, she disappeared back into a world only animals knew.

Through the curtain of green, Ash noticed the house. It was old and ramshackle, like a dried grape of wood. An old white pickup parked out front, loaded with tools, planks of wood and what looked to be a score of dead tomato plants. But it wasn't any of those things that got his attention. 

"Hey," he called, "Short-er!"

"What!"

"Come here! Look at what I found."

Shorter looked both ways, then ran across the stretch of road. Ash giggled at how carefully he did it.

"What is it?"

"Look."

Shorter looked away from where Ash pointed, choosing instead to fixate on the very large pumpkin sitting on the hood of the pickup. Carved into its face was a wide, intimidating smile.

"What the fuck," Shorter stared, "It's not Halloween."

"Shorter--"

"It's June, man."

"Will you stop talking about the damn pumpkin? I was talking about _that!_ " He gestured to the grass where, like a gelatinous purple fungus, lay a dildo. They both stared, until Shorter wrinkled his nose.

"Dude, gross." He weaved through the grass towards the pumpkin. Ash didn't move, and Shorter turned around expectantly. "Come on."

Right, that movie night with Griffin and his friends as a child. He could never forget the _second_ movie they had watched.

If asked, he would not be able to say what the movie had been about, or even the name. The only part he could remember with shocking clarity, and perhaps a touch of the hyperbolic imagination of a child, was that mask.

The pumpkin mask.

Some poor child wore it, so the mask slurped up his face like a milkshake until the pumpkin became a smiling raisin. He distinctively recalled worms fermenting in the ooze.

Ash himself wore a pumpkin mask that Halloween. During the early evening, as he went from house to house, he took joy in his cheap mask and little cape. After that movie, he screamed and cried until the guys complained, prompting Griffin to remove the costume from the house.

Fuck.

Ash went through a lot in his young life, he did not scare easy. This could be attributed to stubbornness, or perhaps even a lack of regard for himself or consequences.

But that boy, his face and skull liquifying into goo, made Ash's mind fuzzy and his stomach churn. Too clearly could he smell it, see the black ooze on the floor. He didn't want to be anywhere near that thing.

"Dude, you coming?"

He nervously bounced on his feet. Shorter couldn't see him like this.

Carefully, he waded through the foliage into the yard. He stumbled over some debris, prompting Shorter to laugh. Ash gave him the finger.

The pumpkin stood oppressively, large and orange, marked by evidence of deer teeth. The small bites in orange flesh made the smiling entity look like it was covered in bubonic sores.

"Let's take it," Shorter decided.

"What? No-- I'm not touching that thing!"

"What's gotten into you? Look at that face, he's just begging to be rescued."

Ash could not even think of words to properly respond to that statement.

"Here he is, Mr. Teeth," came Shorter, throwing open his arms.

Shutting his eyes tight, Ash breathed, "Oh my God."

Behind his eyes, he could hear Shorter groan as he lifted the thing into his arms. "Dude," he said, "what's with the face?"

Cautiously, Ash's eyes opened into slits. That fucking plague-infested face smiled right at him. Quickly, he turned back into the brush.

Shorter called after him and followed, made slower by the hulking beast he carried. Ash stood tight on the side of the road until he caught up.

"That wasn't very nice, Ash. Don't you want to be friends with Mr. Teeth?" Ash glared at him. "C'mon, man. The road is boring. Don't you want to know why a guy has a carved pumpkin on his car in June? You gotta ask the important, uh... essential questions."

"You mean 'existential'," he replied.

"Whatever. Now hold him while I get a marker out of my pack, I'm gonna give him some rad tats."

"Shorter, I'm not--" The entity known as Mr. Teeth was promptly shoved into his arms. Ash let out a shriek, and the pumpkin tumbled to the ground. With a wet smack, Mr. Teeth exploded into orange goo, spilling over into the undergrowth. The innards soaked his shoes.

"FUCK!" Ash yelled. "Those things are nasty!"

Shorter made a sort of wailing noise. "Ash!"

Ash was not having any more to do with this.

"I was ready to learn the secrets of life," Shorter whined. "This was like, Bermuda Triangle shit, and you killed Mr. Teeth before we knew the truth."

"Some secrets aren't meant to be known," Ash bitterly responded.

"Godspeed, Mr. Teeth." Shorter saluted, then began down into the growth again. 

Ash exclaimed in exasperation. "What the hell are you doing?"

"I dunno," came his voice from the brush. "I'm bored. I wanna hold a funeral."

"Goddammit." Tapping his foot, he hissed through his teeth. Shorter was really doing this.

Ash stood for what felt like a few minutes until Shorter made a strange sound. "Shorter," he asked, "You okay?"

A lengthy silence hung in the air.

"Shorter?" he repeated.

When he finally answered, his voice was odd. "Man, you better come down here."

Ash breathed through his nose. "I'm not holding a funeral for your fucking pumpkin, okay?"

"I'm serious, Ash."

That was ominous. Careful to avoid what remained of Mr. Teeth and his stringy insides, he descended into the foliage. It was thicker on this side of the road, and the plants grew taller than he was.

When he reached Shorter, the smell became obvious, and he saw it. A human torso partially wrapped in blankets, bloated and gooey, melting into the leaves.

"Oh my God," Ash gasped.

"There's no arms or legs, dude."

"Yeah, I can fucking see that!" He yelled. "Oh, goddammit." His nausea turned for the worse, and he clutched his stomach. "I'm gonna be sick."

Shorter shifted uncomfortably. "I shouldn't have done that," he said.

"Done what?" Ash wheezed, "Lead me to a fucking body?"

"I thought it was one of those like, store doll things? I poked it with a stick." He put his hand through his hair, looking sheepish. "Humans explode like trucker bombs."

Neither of them knew what to do about the body. After pacing awkwardly for a while on the street, they settled for making a phone call at their next stop. Afterall, food was the current priority. Both teens were so hungry, even a dead body couldn't quench it.

"I need to piss," Ash breathed, then gritted his teeth. "Badly."

"Just go over there," Shorter waved his arms towards the brush. Ash ignored him, he didn't expect Shorter to understand.

Another two miles and they hit a ramp. Off the interstate, farmhouses speckled the landscape of the valley. To their surprise, it didn't take long to find the diner. 

The diner looked more like a house than a restaurant, the large "MONROE'S PLACE" and the placard outside the only clues to its purpose.

"Got any money?" Shorter thumbed at the restaurant. He did, and they walked inside.

Everything was wood and smelled of bacon grease. Bearded men lined the stools at the counter, drinking from identical mugs. A baseball game fizzed in and out on an aging television in the corner, and a deer head mounted on the wall stared right back at Ash.

In another life, places like this were familiar to him. When their father took to boozing, after school his brother would take him to a spot near their village. What the name was, long ago disappeared into his memory, but it certainly had 'chowder' in the title.

That building had a spirit a lot like this one; small, only not as dark. Instead of deer heads, the walls displayed the gifts of Cape Cod, a menagerie of fishes in all shapes and sizes. As a child, Ash would slurp on his soup and stare admiringly at all of those different scales and colors. Griffin gave them names.

It took a moment for him to realize that the patrons were staring at them. He looked away.

Ash felt so hungry, he could feel it in his throat. He stood, leg twitching, bladder burning, eyeing the empty booths. One of the waitresses, an aging white woman with a lazy eye, scribbled on a piece of paper. She locked eyes with the two boys, then went back to what she was doing.

Shorter hissed between his teeth, then called out. "Hey."

"We're full, hun," the waitress said, she didn't bother to look up. "Grills are off."

"What?"

"We're full up."

"There's plenty of places to sit."

The men drinking coffee at the counter turned to face them again. Their eyes were judging, suspicious.

"We need to use your phone," he continued. A man wetly cleared his throat, then silence.

"Jeez," Shorter breathed, "Can my friend use the bathroom, at least?"

One of the men looked at the waitress. "No faggots shaggin' in there, I use that toilet."

They left. Ash could feel the anger radiating off of Shorter, but he needed to piss too badly to share in his frustration.

"Dammit," he told him, "I'm just gonna go behind the dumpster."

Behind the diner, he checked for any sign of life, then let his fly down and willed himself to pee. Sustenance on diet Pepsi and potato chips cramped his abdomen and made his stream short. He bit back a cry of discomfort until his body finally loosened and managed some relief. There was blood on the concrete, and Ash stared at it. He didn't know what to do about this, so figured it was something he would have to worry about later.

When Ash returned, he saw Shorter speaking to an old woman in a babushka. She was frail, but looked wide in her bulky clothes. Shorter smiled nervously during their brief conversation, then watched as she slowly walked away.

"What did that Grandma want?"

"Uh," Shorter showed him a large, blue handkerchief filled with spotted, brown eggs. "Old lady gave me eggs."

"Why?"

"She saw us inside? Was worried we were hungry." A pause and he held one out. "Want an egg?" 

"Geez!" Ash glared, then pushed the hand holding the egg away. "What the hell are we supposed to do with a bunch of raw eggs?" 

They still didn't know what to do about the body, and the realization that they probably could do nothing made Ash feel even sicker. Regardless, Shorter cradled those stupid eggs for the next half mile, mumbling something about how he couldn't throw away a gift from an old woman.

Hunger and stress under the heat made Ash's vision brown. Shorter fared no better, being strangely quiet. Near a defunct store, they found a family huddled around a makeshift stand and a red pickup. A large banner hung from the side, advertising clove honey in scratchy paint.

A little girl in tight, black braids and a flower-patterned dress took their money. She smiled wide at the two strangers, happy to be doing the work of a grown-up. Her face was so bright, that Ash smiled back. Dutifully, she went to a crate to retrieve two jars, and under the watchful eye of her parents, handed them over.

Ash and Shorter found a slice of road then dug into the jars with their fingers. For a moment, Ash forgot about the body, and let the honey rest on his tongue. It was one of the best things he ever tasted.

He sucked his fingers clean while Shorter stood on the shore of the road, his thumb in the air. After twenty minutes of passing cars, a paneled station wagon with West Virginia plates rolled up. The woman on the passenger's side pumped the window down.

"We're going west. Any rest stop is alright," Shorter told her. 

"Get in." 

Ash got in first, pushing some old newspapers to the floor. Inside, the wagon smelled of chewing tobacco, anise, and the strawberry lollipop of a little girl, who he just realized was in the car. Her eyes grew as wide as her cheeks were pink, and she stared in what could only be described as curious horror. She looked right at Ash, absentmindedly sucking on the candy.

"Thanks," he quietly told the driver and got a sort of grunt in response. Ash could now see that the driver was a middle-aged man in a button-down and slacks, face clean from a tight shave. The woman wore a sleeveless dress with large, hopped earrings. Ash had a feeling that she was the reason why they got picked up. 

Shorter barely waited to ask. "Mind if we smoke?" He flipped open his Zippo.

"Go ahead," the driver said. Shorter rolled down the window and clicked the lighter. He offered one to Ash, who refused. Something about being in this car, around this family, made his intestines scramble. When the car peeled back onto the road, his stomach lurched, and he swallowed warm saliva.

"Ash, I'm sure they'll have a phone at the rest stop," Shorter said.

"They do. I've been there," replied the driver. He tapped his fingers on the wheel, "who you need to call?"

"Uh," Shorter paused. Ash could see his brows furrow behind his sunglasses. "Work."

A huffing noise came from the front, and Ash glared at him. These people weren't going to believe that lie.

An awkward silence filled the car. Ash was used to silence, but he could tell that Shorter was getting antsy. He kept his stomach still by staring at the rear ashtray, full of the glittering foil from Wrigley's gum wrappers.

"So what's out west?" The man drawled, attempting to fill the silence. The cab was bumpy, and Ash held his breath.

"My sister is getting married."

"Ah," came the reply.

"My mother died," the woman said and twirled a lock of hair around her finger, "we're going to her funeral."

Shorter's cheeks grew tight. "I'm sorry."

"Don't be, she was a hag."

"Pam!" hissed the driver. The woman only shrugged.

"Mommy," the little girl stared ahead, chewing on the lollipop stick.

"What is it, hun?"

She chewed some more, looked nervously between Ash and Shorter, then stared ahead, "Why does he have stuff in his face?" Shorter smiled tightly.

"I don't know, baby. Do you want another lolli?"

Ash closed his eyes and willed himself to sleep, to drown out the bile in his throat. Every so often he would open them, check the clock, see what exit they were approaching. Time was inching by much too slowly.

After an hour on the interstate, he felt a tug on his sleeve. The child stared at him, eyes wide.

"Yeah?" He managed, raspy and slow, voice unsettlingly unlike his own.

"Can I ask a question?" She said quietly.

He stared at her, his head buzzing from a face pale with sick. Salty, acrid fluid filled his mouth, and Ash swore he could still taste trucker dick from that morning.

His silence was taken for a yes, so she continued, "Why do you smell so bad?"

A lurch in his stomach and his vision turned white.

Shorter noticed now. "Hey man," he put a hand on his shoulder, "you okay?"

Ash threw up, and the little girl screamed.

Moments later, the station wagon pulled up to the curb.

"Think here is good." The driver's fingers were tight on the wheel, his eyes stony. Behind him, the child cried, and Ash gasped for fresh air. "There's a travel stop five miles up the road. Now get out."

Ash quickly crawled over Shorter, sloppily ejecting himself from the cab. He stumbled to his knees in the gravel, before expelling the remaining contents of his stomach into the dirt. Chest heaving, he sputtered, coughed and tasted honeyed semen.

"Pam, I told you. I _told_ you about picking up hitchhikers!"

From the car, Shorter eyed him sympathetically. Ash could hear him spew a chain of apologies before throwing his pack onto the road.

"Ah," Shorter began. He ran his hand through his hair. "Thanks for the ride." The driver's response was inaudible, but Ash was certain it could not have been anything pleasant. Halfway out of the wagon, he paused, sticking his head back inside. He held up the handkerchief. 

“Uh, any chance you want some eggs?"

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The movie Ash remembers with the pumpkin is Halloween III. Technically, it would have been impossible for him to see this film, it wasn't out until the late 80s, but I really wanted to use it. Creative liberties and all that.
> 
> Hope you enjoyed! Please leave a comment, they make my day and encourage me to write faster. 😉
> 
> You can follow me on Twitter @madlikealynx


	3. Stayin' Alive

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Shorter dies, takes Ash to a Waffle House, finds God, and dances in the rain.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Warning for sexual content and the aftermath of abuse.

Dying was boring.

In fact, dying was so boring, that Shorter failed to realize that he was dead. There were only the lights behind his eyes, thick and red, and the shakiness of a squealing pair of rubber wheels.

Shorter struggled to make his lungs work, to breathe through air thick as water that stunk of antiseptic. Figures could be heard moving through the room, large and heavy, like lumbering beasts. Their feet clopped against the tile in neat, steady little steps. His nose burned, sharp with cheap cleansers.

Finally, another squeak and the gurney stopped. He gasped, a strong tightness in his chest, then shivered when his arm felt a cloven paw. It ran down the length, hard and smooth, checking his pulse.

Through half-opened eyes, two awkward forms shifted through the fog. One man, stiffened with the head of an ox, shook his giant horns. Another, wearing the face of a horse, deposited something into a medical waste box. His eyes slid shut, then wouldn't open again.

"What is this?" Shorter asked.

The horse whinnied as the ox snorted. "You're dead, bro," said the ox.

"I'm dead," Shorter allowed that to sink in.

"That's right." An unamused grunt from the horse face. "Gone. Kaput. Lights out."

Panic began to settle. He tried to move, but his body remained useless. So he did the only thing he could think of to do, he yelled, "Shit!"

"No use making a big deal out of it." The ox flared their nostrils through a wet snort. "Everybody kicks the bucket."

"I wasn't supposed to _right now._ "

"You know how many times a day we hear that, dude? It's like Madonna on the radio, it never stops."

Anxiety went from his head down to his toes. His body shook, the stretcher beneath him icy cold. "I hate Madonna. Oh fuck, am I in hell?"

"Chill. We just need to weigh your soul, you'll fill out some paperwork, then you can go."

"Are you telling me that you need paperwork to die?"

"It's just protocol."

The gurney shifted and started to move again, the wheels gaining traction. Something skid, then bumped. An elevator chimed.

"You catch the game?" Horse hooves shifted on the metal floor. More of those bright, fluorescent lights.

"Nah, had to pick up Emily from practice." A hacking noise, a sniff. "Hey, I think the cafeteria has that strawberry salad again."

Another high-pitched ring and horse face whinnied. He could hear two pairs of cloven feet clop across the floor as the stretcher entered a new room. A clutter, a lot like the movement of tools, then his body stilled.

"Parents said he was difficult," said the ox-head to the horse-face. "Definitely not as good as Cousin Wan. _He_ would have helped with the restaurant, you know."

"Yeah, for sure."

Shorter miserably tried to move, his voice desperate to scream, but something wet and hard clogged his throat.

"A good kid, that one. This guy, though... You know, CPS came to their apartment. Math teacher caught him selling his Ritalin to other kids at school."

He couldn't breathe.

"Okay, kid. You just gotta sign here." Rubbing a cloven hand over his snout, the ox wiped away the drool there, then grunted. This close, Shorter could smell musty fur laced with grass.

"I can't see the paper," he managed, voice sandpaper rough. "My eyes won't open."

"Don't matter. It's just, you know, typical stuff about getting you into eternity."

"If it's eternity, shouldn't I fucking read it?"

"Ah," horse-face blinked. "Well." The sound of an instrument scrawling across a piece of paper. "We're in a bit of a hurry, don't know if it can wait. Gotta get my kid from school."

"This is eternity," he tried, sounding uncharacteristically weak and desperate, "and I can't see anything. Am I really dead?" Something was pushed into his hand, and his fingers clenched around it in familiarity. A pencil.

A hoof tapped the paper. "Right there."

He struggled, willed himself to force open his eyes. Through shadowy shapes, he could see the form.

His name, the one nobody ever called him, presented itself in tight doctor's scrawl. A block of words followed, complex and difficult to make out. But on the bottom rested a line, empty and ready for his signature. In his hand, the pencil trembled.

"Don't got all day," whistled the ox-head.

His fingers fidgeted over the pencil, tapping it against the paper. Both animals snorted impatiently. When he looked back at his name, he found the eraser had chipped away a "G." He stared, half-drunk in a cocktail of confusion and dread.

Hadn't he heard a story like this before? The pencil flipped in his hand, from lead to eraser.

"Hey," the ox sounded more alert. "What are you doing?"

In a quick movement, he erased his name, and the world went black.

Shorter began his second life full of tubes and Vicodin. When his eyes opened, a needle pricked his arm, and a nurse said Nadia was on her way.

She cried and held his hand. Chest pain trembled down to the groin, where a catheter dripped down his leg. They told him he had been in surgery, that he slept for two days. The medication might make his brain fuzzy, the doctor said. Nadia cried more.

Days faded into brief segments that consisted of blood draws, Nadia, food, and medication. Some noises from the TV, Reagan talking about Russia, wet coughing from his eight-year-old neighbor, burdened with pneumonia. The children's ward kept uncannily busy.

When the static lifted over his life, he was given a plastic vacuum tube to breathe into. Something about helping his lungs, so he wouldn't get an infection. He sucked into the mouthpiece, raising the piston up and down until his chest ached.

Nadia had a shift at the coffee shop when it came time for him to walk again. A physiatrist came into the room, introduced himself, then helped his body into a wheelchair. The foley hung from the apparatus like a demented Christmas ornament, shiny and full of urine. It was shameful, being wheeled around half-clothed in a patterned gown, attached to a bag of piss. He felt less naked in the shower.

As the assistance bar came into view, Shorter spotted her. A little girl with a bald head, white t-shirt and little shorts patched in flowers. She sucked her thumb as she followed behind.

Shorter awkwardly shifted in his chair. She made no footsteps, not a sound coming from her mouth. The doctor said nothing to acknowledge her, only led Shorter closer to the bar.

"Alright, we're going to have you take the bar. You'll need to slowly make your way to the other side."

Shorter struggled to stand, so the doctor kept him steady until he gripped the bar, cold and metal under his fingers. The legs beneath him trembled, his midsection ached.

The girl continued to stare. He looked from her to the doctor, who seemed oblivious to her presence. Shaking, he took a step forward.

Immediately, he gritted his teeth. The pain! Nausea filled his throat while his lungs, desperate and dry, intensely gasped.

The doctor nudged him on, "It's okay. You can do this."

Another step. Then another. Clamminess whitened his eyes and turned his face gray. It hurt so bad, breathing so difficult, that he swallowed air. Three more steps with his eyes closed, two more with them open. The end of the bar seemed closer, now.

Standing at the end, was another child. A little boy, with burns tattooed from his face to little fingers. He stood stoically, bouncing a ball. It wordlessly floated from his hand to the floor.

"Holy shit," Shorter wheezed. His lungs could burst at any minute.

"Kevin, it's okay," said the doctor. "Just breathe."

More kids filled the hall. All wore little white bracelets and IV wires, the tubes slithering behind them like puppet strings. Teens with bald heads, kids missing limbs, children coughing and screaming. Like an ocean, they grew thicker and thicker around him, filling his lungs with death and disinfectant. His legs buckled, and Shorter began to scream.

His mama used to say he came out of the womb with a smile. She said a lot of silly things like that, words more fairy tale than truth.

Shorter quickly began to forget what her voice sounded like. He forgot a lot of things. The caseworker would tell him that this was normal, that he still had to digest what happened.

With four years on him, it became Nadia's responsibility to handle the aftermath of a tragedy. For weeks, she made phone calls. Often, she went to appointments that involved waiting in long lines.

When she asked for his company after school, he declined; his stomach hurt, he said, only a half-truth. Two hours later, she returned with a plastic bag jingling with car keys and two leather wallets. That night, he could hear her muffled cries through the wall.

Shorter's wounds grew smaller and turned into scars, but the ones in his mind ravenously fattened. He blamed his increasing malaise on the pain killers he was no longer taking. Turns out, pain is a good excuse to stay in bed all day.

Before the incident, he spent most free hours at the basketball court near his home. Simple but well-kept, the court kept busy with lively teens in fancy sneakers. When his parents still owned the restaurant, he avoided cleaning dishes by joining in quick scrimmages. Now, with staples holding his guts together, he could only watch.

When Nadia left to make money, he sat on the bleachers and smoked. The kids he called friends walked on their tiptoes, unsure of how to deal with this foreign situation. Loneliness got Shorter hopping fences into concerts and loitering in music shops. Living life under headphones or in magazine aisles, finding calm in the pounding of a rubber ball against the pavement, set his mind free.

Making new friends in these places could not be easier, a cheap source of distraction that ripped the bad thoughts from his brain. Weed cannibalized the depression, made him horny and anxious about girls. Other days, alcohol and music numbed the ache in his heart. At school, he was flunking all of his classes.

The New York apartment lasted only three more months. Tragedy puts a countdown on normalcy.

First, Nadia sold the toaster, then her prom dress. Next came the blender, the mini washer, Shorter's bicycle, an assortment of tools and knickknacks. When Nadia asked about his basketball cards and pair of Jordans, he knew things were bad. Coming home to grooves in the carpet from where the couch used to be, he knew things would only get worse.

His oldest memory belonged to a cabinet in his parent's bedroom, a representation of everything their parents once owned upon coming to America. A gift on their wedding day, it was made of bone, wood, and years of use. Little animals lived inside the oak, making homes in each and every drawer.

In childhood, Shorter would gently pet the carvings, as if the tiger might suddenly come alive to bite off a finger. Often, he took delight in shoving his Happy Meal toys and himself into its shadow, laying in the dark with the rubber-band boats and styrofoam planes. Within the cabinet's shadow, the grain and smell of incense invoked tales of large-eyed, sharp-tongued tigers, and nimble cranes that twirled in the sky like ballet dancers. The names and stories made up for them were told to his mother, who quietly smiled at an excitement so modestly simple.

_Māomī went to find his stripes_

_Birdy took them away_

It was the last thing to go. On the eve of the sale, Shorter repeated a once-forgotten ritual. Far too big to fit anything other than his head, the view looked different from his memory. Smaller, far less impressive. As a child, everything seems more important and unique; life so new and shiny, that the simplest of things can be mistaken for magic.

He bumped his head when he pulled himself out, cursed, then said his goodbyes. To his parents, to his home.

_Māomī didn't want to be a lion_

_But Birdy hid them in the bay_

Shorter sold the pills to keep his Walkman. Nadia didn't argue.

While he felt prepared to say goodbye to his old life, he determined himself unequipped for the chaos of homelessness. Whenever Nadia spoke to a caseworker, his brain fizzled in and out. This situation could not be allowed to make sense. The word salad of the adults in the room proved to be easier to digest than the reality of their parents' deaths, their sudden displacement, and ejection from normal life.

For Nadia, the objective remained to stay together, to get through this. Right now, they needed each other, and loneliness meant another kind of death. Walking through the shelter doors, he often saw this type of dying. They had the same eyes, hollowly absent and filled with shame.

Homelessness meant fighting for corners, privacy a door prize. Most nights, the middle of a room was home. Shorter tamed the coldness in his blood and the screaming in his ears by listening to the walkman. The squeals of children and babies leaked into the chorus of "London Calling" as he closed his eyes and willed everything to disappear.

Life in the shelter played out absurdly, an obstacle of middles and "almosts." Couples argued about where to go in hallways, fire drills woke them in the middle of the night. In the morning, a bed welcomed a body, then rejected another by late afternoon. A family's fate lay at the mercy of a piece of paper and the mood of an underpaid clerk.

Every night, ghosts floated on the ceiling, circling the shelter like vultures. They moved across the room in brief flashes of color, matching the poorly-painted murals of rainbows and bootleg Ninja Turtles. It made him nauseous, to think of dying in a place like this.

On Thursdays a couple of women in matching t-shirts would arrive on-site, dedicating their time to the bored and anxious shelter kids. Shorter watched as small children made food out of play-dough in plastic kitchens, colored big-eyed dogs and exchanged useless money. Too old and too young, he belonged to a demographic on nobody's radar. All anybody could offer him was the cracked sidewalks, freckled with trash and an overgrown yard.

Three blocks down, an old basketball court nestled behind a chainlink fence. Grass poked holes in the concrete, the hoop net-less and crooked, but it got him closer to home. No matter where he went, the sounds of rhythmic pigskin and scuffling sneakers stayed the same. It slowly became easier to forget about the life he left behind, made inaccessible by the MTA card he could no longer afford.

On the third week, they moved to another shelter. On the fourth month, the walkman broke. The tape ate and spewed film, its music reduced to ratty knots of magnetic tape. Shorter rolled up the film into the cassette and kept it anyway.

Shorter couldn't be sure when Nadia decided that she couldn't do this anymore. Maybe it happened when that caseworker, the one with the rimmed glasses and a frog's smile, told her "this is a shelter, not a home." She saw no future, only instability.

That first night in a foster home, the right synapses refused to click. His foster brother recognized the look of a fresh fish in a new tank, so rolled a blunt thick as his finger. On swing-sets in the park, a day's worth of memories decayed as the joint got smoked into a roach. Nothing of worth was lost.

New places meant new people, new schools, and new expectations. There were no staples, only revolving doors. Life lumbered forward, but never paused long enough for anything meaningful to happen. A life that might be gone tomorrow did not feel worth taking the time to appreciate, especially when that permanency waited for him elsewhere.

Shorter went through a handful of families and homes, all nice people who kinda gave a shit, but he struggled to adjust. These relationships were much too fragile, much too lonely, and he walked on his tiptoes in every emotional situation.

In a world lacking sovereignty, rebellion made his heart sing. A disposable razor shaved the sides of his head to the grain, while egg whites thickened overgrown hair. The safety pin found in a parking lot pierced his ears and nose. When the nose piercing got infected, the same ring went into his eyebrow. He gave himself a tattoo on his foot with a pencil, paperclip, and a ballpoint pen.

On the day he arrived in Falkner, New Jersey, a fresh tattoo in the shape of a "3" burned in-between his fingers, he saw suburbia for the first time. His third home would be with a family called the Martinez's, a pleasant couple who took in four kids other than himself.

They lived in a large, but modest house on their own strip of suburbia, in a town younger then his parents had been. Emptiness premeditated everything in this barely lived-in town, down to the clean sidewalks made of freshly dried concrete.

The Martinez's kindness felt temporary and dangerous to get used to, like the newness of sidewalks. It was all too strange in this place that was manicured to look like a magazine, a home where a mother had food on the table at 6 o'clock, two cars parked in the driveway, where a family used a dishwasher and a drier.

His own parents had been loving, but distant. This house full of symmetry did not fit in with the chaos that his life had become.

On this block with its rows of identical houses and trees only slightly taller than he was, Shorter met Lao. They shared a bedroom that overlooked a pair of twin two-storied homes and a construction site.

The family seemed to have trouble dealing with Lao, a seventeen-year-old troublemaker who spent his time either in arcades or spanking it to porn. Much like Shorter, his family couldn't be around. He had a dead mother and a father off in the Marines, a stern man who raised his half-brother in stints between Kuwait and China. Some years, he got a birthday card.

They spent their days together smoking weed and talking about the future, which for teens usually meant far away as the next few months. Lao wanted to travel, but mostly he wanted to be with his brother. Shorter just wanted for high school to be over.

Talking to Lao came easily, they understood each other without the details. Both learned how to shave from a magazine and about sex-ed from a television box. They understood absence, death, and loss. Shooting the shit about basketball and Star Trek felt infinitely easier than pondering where they stood in life.

The bait shop on Ernest was the only shop in town that sold them cigarettes and nudie mags. A middle-aged redneck named Frank, thick with callouses and the smell of fish, never carded. He'd only study the woman on the cover, wetly clear his throat, then give each boy an approving nod.

On a particularly hot day in September, Lao brimmed with an anxious desire to cause trouble. They bought ten bags filled with a thousand crickets each, stuffed full of frantic, jumping little bodies. Counting them would be useless, so they took Frank's word for it.

"You boys goin' fishing," he said, not so much a question as a statement. Frank could play dumb, but the lucidity stewed in his voice.

"I have lizards," said Lao, "One of those big chameleon-geckos, or whatever."

Frank shrugged and rung them up. "Rad. Want the usual cigarettes?"

Each bag got left unattended in toilet stalls, unleashing an army of cricket hell on Falkner High. When the screams began, Shorter grinned from his seat in US History. It felt good to see the world react to something he had done, to hear students murmur about it as they walked around crushed little bodies in the hallways.

In October, Lao discovered how the door latch to the roof of the school didn't lock. Years later, Shorter's memory could still conjure up the smell of that staircase, like pencils and moldy crayons, the spice of Lao's deodorant. Rolls of paper towels and toilet paper shredded in their hands and dropped from the roof. Paper snow spun and fell to the earth, fluttering like little white butterflies. After, they got blazed in a phone booth, a celebration of the tiny little changes they made in the world.

Rides were hitched to sneak into clubs, ecstasy got rolled, they danced and skipped school. The ghosts were scarce. Lao was the best friend Shorter ever had.

Visits with Nadia happened too rarely for her to be disappointed in him, but Shorter endured enough for two. As he spent his late teens partying, his sister found her own used up in shelters, working and worrying about him. Those days she waitressed at a restaurant in Chinatown that didn't have menus in English and paid all of their employees in cash. She lived in an apartment with five other women but had begun saving for her own. Some weekends, they saw each other.

Shorter didn't realize how far they drifted apart until he learned about Charlie. He heard the news in a phone booth, rotating between quarters.

"Wait," he slid two more quarters into the slot, coins pleasantly clunking into the chamber, "He's a cop?"

"He's a detective."

"That's a cop." Shorter shifted weight onto his other foot, the other line sighed.

"I'm _happy_ , Keung." Nadia's voice seemed sharper than he remembered. His palms itched, suddenly aware of how much he wanted a cigarette. "Look, I want you to meet him. It would mean a lot to me."

He breathed through his nose and readied another quarter.

"I'm begging you," she continued. "Please hold back the "All Cops Are Bastards" rhetoric, just for one day. For me."

"Okay, Nads."

"For the first time in years, I feel safe." Her voice came across so sincere, his heart ached. "Let me be happy. Please."

He lied and told her he was out of quarters, then let the line drop.

That night, Lao eased him into forgetfulness by pouring rum into his Coca-Cola. Knowing he caused all of this, did not stop him from feeling sorry for himself. Halfway through the glass, he did forget.

Then Lao met the girlfriend. She was a pretty girl with honey brown eyes and perfectly manicured nails, who only seemed to share an interest in booze, horniness and being Chinese. When he talked about her, his words became enunciated by vulgar vignettes. Shorter hated this side of his friend.

Their room missed a body when Lao began sneaking out alone. In his place sat an old ghost, a woman with shaky hands and a kind smile. Every night, she would wander back and forth through the room, as if trying to prepare him a cup of tea. She seemed amused by the music Shorter would play.

Lao stuck around until even Coach in gym noticed his absence. Shorter spotted him and the girlfriend making out behind the bleachers, drooling over each other with teenage impatience.

When Lao became scarce in his life, Shorter found himself alone and aged out of a system that never wanted him in the first place. Nadia offered to get him to California, but he lied about a girl and a job. Homelessness felt safer than being stuck with this man who took his only family away.

He learned about the wedding in the same phone-booth, a day after arriving in Manhattan.

"I wrote you a letter," she insisted, about her move to California. "You didn't get it? Are they not giving you your mail?" Shorter imagined the letter sitting on a desk in the foster home, where he had not lived in months.

Almost a month stood between now and the wedding, but Shorter needed an excuse to leave. Sticking around the city would only hurt, nothing but bouncing around random shelters in an aimless daze. It was easier to travel and pretend there was a place to go home to at the end of it all, even if it led him to this dead-end truck stop in North Carolina.

The dog followed him up until the end of the lot, where it stopped, paws firm on the concrete. It stared at Shorter expectantly, tail softly wagging.

"I gotta go," Shorter told it. "You can come, you know."

With a tight tail and sad eyes, the dog flattened on the road, head locked between its paws. The tail went still, and that big brown eye looked up with regret.

There were times when ghosts could only go so far, and something seemed to be keeping the dog here. Shorter wondered how long it had been since the dog had been acknowledged by anyone, and almost regretted reminding it.

"Okay," said Shorter, and he bowed his head. "I get it. Take care, yeah?" Turning on his heels, he walked back towards Ash, who waited impatiently by the shore of road.

Ash proved difficult to figure out. When he claimed to be seventeen, Shorter figured that sounded about right. He seemed too young but much too old. The way he acted, it was like he lived life under a gun, just up and leaving society.

At his side, stood the man--no, the ghost, from before. This one proved himself to be a real traveler.

Like all ghosts, he kept deathly quiet. Often he walked by Ash's side, watching him, keeping his expression firm and unchanging. Other times, he would glance at Shorter, giving the slightest hint of a smile. As ghosts usually were, he seemed surprised that somebody noticed him there.

Something sad came over Shorter when the ghost appeared. For someone to follow Ash this far, there had to be a reason, a very important one. Worst of all, Shorter knew the ghost had reasons to be worried about Ash. Especially now, crouched on the side of a dusty road, emptying his stomach into a mound of dirt and ferns.

Shorter breathed, "Shit, Ash."

"I'm sorry." Ash wheezed, then coughed.

"I'm just worried. You cool?"

Ash didn't say much. Ropes of snot and drool dripped from his face as he panted, his fists pressed into the dirt. Awful could not begin to describe how he looked.

Shorter retrieved a tin of mints that did not smell minty. The joint inside looked half-smoked, but it would be enough. "Here," he offered. "Should help."

"I don't want a fucking cigarette," Ash grumbled.

"It's grass."

Ash thought about it, then put the joint between his lips. Shorter lit the end and watched as he inhaled. Ash coughed and spit before taking another drag, repeating the gesture. For a moment, his face turned grayer, but he swallowed it back. Groggily, the joint went back to Shorter, who took his own hit.

"We can sit for a minute," he said, smoke wafting from his nose. His fingers tingled as he took a final puff. Ash stared hard at the pavement, his sweater speckled with vomit.

"Tell me the truth," Shorter lowered his head, "Are you alright?"

"That family... " he said, voice small and raspy. "They got to me."

"They were pretty weird."

"Pretty weird?" Ash spat. "They let us freaks into a car with their little kid inside."

"Huh."

Ash breathed and shut his eyes. His fingers were starting to twitch, he must have begun to feel it, too. Shorter sighed and let the high flow from his throat to his toes. For a few moments, both boys allowed the weed to marinate inside their bodies.

"Your stomach doin' okay now?"

"Yeah, I think so." He wiped his mouth with a black sleeve. "I swear, when I puked I could taste that fucker from this morning."

The road stretched eternally, spots of road signs swimming in an ocean of black. As he walked, Shorter felt the tar swallow his feet, like walking on spongy bread. He closed his eyes and took a few steps. For a moment, he lost track of time. How long had they been walking? Five minutes, twenty?

He looked back at Ash, who stared into the sky with glassy eyes. Ahead, the distance gleamed, far away in a dead spot of Douglas fir. If their stomachs rotted away, in fifty years somebody might find their skulls. Mushrooms in eye sockets, craniums inseminated by spores of ferns and beetles, their identities decomposing into fertilizer for eternity.

"Hey," Shorter mused, "I think that this road is so long, that if we keep following it, at the end we could find God."

Ash paused and thought about this.

"That's a really stupid thing to say," came the reply. "You really think with anywhere God could go, he'd go to fucking America?"

"if you're God, why _not_ go to America? you could do anything."

More silence. The gravel crunched beneath his Doc Martens.

"Have you ever read 'Waiting for Godot?'" Ash asked.

"Do I look like somebody who has read shit like that?"

"I dunno, I've been surprised before." Ash looked at him, then booted a rock across the road. "But, it's just like this, walking down the interstate. You know, just waiting forever for something."

"Like the future?"

"Yeah, or God. Or at least somebody who gives a shit."

A car hummed down the road. Shorter held up his thumb, but it continued past.

"I'm sorry we lost our ride." The way he said it, Ash sounded meek and genuinely ashamed. Shorter only grinned.

"Don't be, I was finally able to get rid of those eggs." Ash laughed.

"You're fucking crazy." His smile heavy and high, the weed weighed thickly in Ash's eyes. He closed them and perched on the street, still and steady. Shorter stood at his side, allowing the high to ripple from his toes to his brain. This wild boy kept him on his toes. With Ash, he could feel the world.

It took an hour to get to a ramp off the highway. Ash lumbered with a heavy limp, his hi-tops clapping in pieces against the road. Hazy eyes and small steps, he didn't look great. Without the weed, Shorter knew they would be invalids on the side of the road.

Thankfully, this strip of the street seemed alright, as good as any to make camp for the night. A McDonalds glowed behind the Waffle House, various little shops peppered the lot, and a gas station kept occupied. Some kind of clothing store caught his eye, and Shorter made a mental note to take Ash there in the morning.

"Look," Shorter said, pointing to a sign in the distance. "A Waffle House! That means we've reached civilization."

"Civilization looks boxy."

"And greasy. Let's go get it."

Dusk tinted the sky dark and purple when they stood at the foot of the restaurant. Wafts of fast food thickly filled the air, and Shorter's stomach rumbled down to his swollen feet.

He removed the pack of Marlboros from his pocket, "Want a smoke?"

Ash blinked, closed his eyes, then held it.

"Dude," the smile grew wide on Shorter's face, "you're so fucking high."

"Because of you," drawled the reply.

"So, smoke?"

"No. My stomach is still fucked up. I just need to eat."

Inside, everything yellowed under fluorescent lights. Grills fizzled with hot grease, plates rattled, and the sugary smell of syrup permeated everything. Shorter shivered with impatience, he couldn't wait to get off his feet.

A young waitress sucking a cigarette seated them at a booth near a row of windows. Ash peered out, watching the lights sparkle in the distance. Within the deepening darkness, homes burned like fireflies.

"Here you are," she said, an accent sweetened with Southern twang, and handed each of them a menu. "I'll be back with your drinks. Want an ashtray?"

"Please," Shorter replied, then watched as she walked away. Her legs were firm under the short dress, and he stared. There was nothing like a woman with tight calves, and his stomach churned with something that wasn't hunger.

Something soft bounced off his cheek, and he whipped around back at Ash. He had a plastic straw in his mouth, bobbing it with his tongue. The paper wrapper was balled up on the table. "Pervert," he scoffed.

"Hey," Shorter frowned, then turned his attention to the menu, "I just like a pretty lady."

Ash clicked his tongue and looked down, his eyes scanning the menu like a picky vulture.

"What you thinking about getting?" Shorter pried.

Something in Ash's eyes hesitated, almost as if he wasn't thrilled with his choices. "House salad," he said. What the fuck?

Shorter gaped. "Come on, man! Your first real meal in what... who knows how the fuck long, and you're gonna eat some fucking lettuce?"

Ash blinked, then studied the pictures of waffles sprinkled with syrup and nuts. He bit the inside of his cheek. "Well, what are _you_ getting?"

"The All-Star Special, obviously. Fucking pecan waffles."

Ash replied with his tongue. "You're gonna get fat."

"Nah," Shorter grinned.

A diet Pepsi and a Coca-Cola went on the table when the waitress returned. With a smile, she flipped open a notepad. "Need a moment?" She asked.

"I'm ready," Shorter began and removed his sunglasses. "I'll have the All-Star Special. Eggs over-easy."

"What about you, hun?" Her eyes rested on Ash, who still chewed on his straw. He hesitated, then gazed at the menu. "I'll have the same."

"Eggs as well?"

"Sure."

As she left, Shorter reached over the table and punched his shoulder. "Right on!" Ash weakly smiled back.

Shorter leaned into his seat, smoke wafting from his nose. "So, how you feeling?"

He must have still been pretty high because Ash was ripping apart the wad of paper between his thumbs, his fingers twisting and pulling at the ends. "I'm okay."

"Cool," the cigarette went into the ashtray. "You weren't looking too good."

A shrug and Ash went back to shredding the wrapper. It was in pieces on the counter when their waffles arrived; as big as their heads and smothered in pecans and butter.

Shorter scratched butter into his waffle and cracked open the egg yolks. Next came the syrup, followed by a frost of powdered sugar. With amusement, he watched as Ash imitated each and every step.

"Thanks for today," Ash said, then sprinkled a thin layer of powder over buttered syrup. He watched as the snow of sugar dissolved into the stream.

"For what?"

"I dunno. For giving a shit? You didn't have to help me."

"Don't worry about it." His stomach was ready for this, and Shorter took a bite. The dough melted on his tongue; thick, buttery, and sweet. Good shit.

Any reservations Ash seemed to have had were gone. He looked amusingly childish, forking chunks of waffle and eggs into his mouth. A bit of syrup dribbled onto his chin and he snickered as he wiped it away, seemingly amused by his own enthusiasm. They smiled at each other.

"This is one of the best days I've had in a while," he told him.

Shorter laughed. "You're a crazy dude," he pointed a fork, "you were puking and miserable for half of it."

Ash shrugged, then chewed some more. His cheeks looked so full they could burst.

"I'll show you a much better time when we get to New Orleans." Something told Shorter that Ash could use a good time.

The more he ate, the less fidgety Ash seemed to get. Shorter couldn't blame him, just sitting down alleviated the cramping in his Docs and the hint of nausea bubbling in his stomach. While the day definitely had its fun moments, it was also stressful as hell. For awhile Ash could do nothing but talk about the body, but now even he was silent about it. Shorter felt ready to just shut his mind off for the day.

Two clean plates and a paid check later, they made camp. Shorter's set-up was far from fancy: a thin sleeping bag, a mylar blanket, a bundle of clothes. They filled up his thermos with water from a gas station drinking fountain, bought some bug spray, then found a quiet spot to settle.

The faint wind took away the pressure of a long, hot day. Shorter sprayed himself and the blankets with bug spray, then handed the can over. The smell burned his nose, and Ash coughed. 

"I only have one sleeping bag," Shorter said about their sleeping situation. He sounded sheepish. "You can have the mylar blanket, or we can share. I don't care either way."

Ash stared at him, then wordlessly took the mylar blanket. After carefully placing it on the ground, he settled on his knees. For the first time, he pulled the hoodie over his head, revealing a slender, wiry frame. He had the body of someone used to missing meals, the skin taut over thin ribs.

When he caught Shorter staring, Ash faintly glared. Bundling up the sweatshirt into a ball, he lay on it like a pillow.

Shorter had to wonder. Even after miles of walking together, he barely knew anything about Ash.

"You're a runaway, right?"

Ash blinked up at him from the makeshift bed. The mylar crinkled. "I guess. Had a life, didn't want it."

Simple and vague. "Lots of guys say that."

"Whatever." He shut his eyes. "I have nowhere else to go, anyway."

"So, you're just gonna keep wandering?"

"I guess so."

Shorter noticed that the ghost was back. Standing slightly away from their camp, he looked out onto the road, barely moving. Most ghosts seemed sad, but this was new, something eerie. Ghosts didn't typically stick around like this.

He had to ask. "Got any family?"

One green eye opened. "I'm trying to sleep, Shorter." An edge to his voice, dictating that this was definitely a sensitive topic. Maybe another time.

Crawling into his sleeping bag, Shorter stared up at the sky. The night before, the stars had been so bright, the sky could have been a piece of paper poked full of holes. Tonight, the sky darkened into a milky haze, whitened by fast-food neon.

What was Nadia doing right now? Supposedly, she lived in a different world now, one shared only in sporadic pieces over phone calls. The big sister he knew had stretched out of her old skin, growing into this new person he did not recognize. If he thought about it too much, his heart clenched.

Charlie built the wall between them. Shorter wanted Nadia to be happy, she deserved happy, after everything. But Shorter also wanted to be important to someone, and now his sister didn't need him anymore. There were things that he didn’t know about her, that she didn't know about him, and he hated how much that hurt. He missed life when it was just him and Nadia against the world.

In the morning, Shorter bought a large cup of bland dark coffee and Ash refused breakfast. They went to the small Goodwill on the lot, where Ash found a tacky t-shirt with a cat on it.

"You like cats?"

Ash looked at the shirt dripping from the hanger and shrugged. "It's a dollar." He hung it over his arm, then picked out a pair of red sneakers from a bargain bin.

Shorter struggled more than Ash did to find a pair of sneakers his size. He settled for a pair of white Nike ripoffs, an embarrassment, but a relief to his toes. At the register, they agreed to split a package of fifty-cent socks.

Boredom dictated how the day would be spent, anything to break that monotony of black tar. The next ramp housed a building with a big ball of twine (supposedly the world's largest), another a statue of an anthropomorphic elephant smoking a cigar. On the Tennessee border, a sign advertising an overlook led to a striking view of blue peaks, where Shorter joked that God must have populated the world by frosting the mountain tops.

In a spot thick with ferns and moss, Ash discovered a squirming rabbit in a snare. The little chestnut form gasped and struggled, a thin trail of blood leaking from it's nose. With each breath, it squeaked.

Ash cut open the wire with his knife, but the rabbit wiggled then crumpled. Its chest heaved and twitched, before deflating and going still. Those green eyes betrayed the boy, who struggled not to show his distress.

"Least you made its last memory a bit of kindness," Shorter told him. "Not everything can be saved."

He watched as Ash removed the snare from the rabbit's raw neck, before burying its small body in a grave of dead leaves.

They slept in camping grounds and at rest stops. Most nights, they talked, about small and big things. Ash was scary smart. He never needed a calculator, knew the names of dead writers, how Tom Sawyer was the first novel ever written on a typewriter. When passing a large mural full of sea creatures, Shorter learned that inside an octopus pumped the blood of three hearts.

Not once did it get old talking to Ash. He never talked about himself, but he didn't need to. Something about his actions, the things he said, told a story just as vivid.

"We could go and stay anywhere, you know." Shorter said it over a second overlook, in a valley thick with fir and oak. The day remained beautifully clear, whitewashing everything with the sun. "Even here."

He and Ash, they had nobody to live for. Anywhere they walked, they could make their home. Saying it out loud had a type of freedom to it.

Ash seemed confused, as though he never realized the tangibility of limitless choices. Something told Shorter that he was accustomed to not making his own decisions.

"I guess so," his new friend mused.

Somewhere along their fifth day on the road, a guy in a red pickup let them ride in the bed. Stuffed with palettes and paint cans, it was hard and bumpy, but a relief. Ash slept, his body curled into a tight ball, while Shorter watched the road gradually disappear into the trees.

Midday, the animals came out. It began with one deer, a small doe sporting a thin face, large ears and a wide hole in her tummy. A stag joined her side, a broken leg flopping behind him as he leaped and flew. Little chestnut, freckled fawns followed, tiny tails twitching and happy until the small family became a herd of ghostly deer. Powerful legs pushed them through the air, the tight bodies fading in and out of existence. They hopped and skipped, stretched their muscles in the wind.

It was beautiful. So many surrounded the car, that Shorter would have not been surprised if the herd welcomed every deer that ever died on this stretch of road. He watched until Ash stirred. His legs stretched, sneakers scratching against the truck bed, then released a yawn.

Watching Shorter’s face, he stared. “What are you looking at?” He asked.

The herd began to dissipate at the edge of Tennessee, where truck guy deposited them in the city of Knoxville. Highways obliterated everything in this city that seemed to be slowly coming back from the dead, landmarks surrounded by hollow husks of buildings and homes.

Like him, Knoxville divided itself in half; an interzone that kept half alive, half dead, split since the Civil War. Ash briefly mentioned something about the World’s Fair that took over the city in 1982, a glimpse of hope in a forgotten city. Remnants of this event were everywhere, swarming with faceless ghosts. Shorter could see what the city tried to be, had been, and was. It was dizzying and beautiful at once.

Shorter shared the rest of his weed with Ash in the park, where they watched children scream and squirrels fat with rubbish jump from trees to trash cans. Beaten by the elements, a large sculpture of a Rubik's cube gleamed tackily under overgrown plants and dirt. Ash, ever curious, read the plaque and explained away the eyesore as a gift from Hungary, another ghost of the fair.

"Let's get a motel tonight," Shorter interrupted.

Ash studied the giant Rubik's cube, his gaze unmoving. Something in him looked distant and odd. "Okay."

"I want to sleep in a real bed for once."

"Okay," Ash repeated.

The owner of a small car wash paid them a dollar an hour each to help with the Saturday queue. It was messy, fun work. A boom box spun mixtapes full of Depeche Mode and Tears for Fears, while the sun kept their bodies and the concrete dry.

Ash proved surprisingly meticulous. Everything he did, he aimed to do it right. He scrubbed windows and lights to a polish, buffed out paint into a crystalline shine. On his knees in muddy asphalt, he checked tires and cleared the rims.

"You a car guy?" Shorter asked.

Ash seemed uninterested in the question and shrugged. Using a hose to wash away bubbles of soap, he watched the water stream and puddle on the ground. Slowly, his lips twitched into a smirk. Before Shorter could take cover, a stream of water-soaked his clothes and Ash laughed. It was wonderfully pure and bright.

"Oh, it's on!" His own hose in hand, Shorter sprayed the instigator in the face. Ash stumbled to his feet, kicking up water in an attempt to take cover. Soap-suds went everywhere, and he screamed when the water covered him from head to foot.

Their war got them let go earlier than expected, but the funds were enough for the motel. Dripping wet and hands raw with work, they bought a room at the Motel 6.

It wasn't much, a small but clean room occupied by two twin beds with flowery duvets and starchy white sheets. One of the electrical sockets hung off the wall, rendering the lamps useless. The TV worked however and advertised free movies and porno. Shorter joked about buying one, and Ash only stared back, tight-lipped and pale.

Something in the motel seemed to make Ash anxious. While Shorter watched TV, he sat on his own bed, stiff and straight. Ten minutes into a game show, he locked himself in the bathroom for a while. No running water, no flushing toilet, no movement at all. Just the hum of the a/c and silence.

Shorter would knock, say a few supportive words, but get nothing. Ash refused to answer. That was weird, but got to be annoying when Shorter needed to piss. After an hour of his bladder fit to burst, he let Ash know the deal. He exited the toilet, only to quickly move past him. Firmly and quiet, he sat on the mattress.

Retrieving some ice and a bag of chips for the night, Shorter came back to find him sitting around a pile of motel stationery, all torn into careful little squares. He watched as each one got folded into a little bird, then filled with air. Each time, Ash would study the little thing, as if expecting something to happen. Cupping one in his hand, he looked down at it, then crumbled it into a fist.

"You like origami?" Shorter sat on the bed. Ash didn't answer, nor did he say anything for the remainder of the day. That night, he slept on the floor.

Sometimes, Ash felt close; other days, he was far away and unreachable. Many people came through Shorter’s life, enough for him to be accustomed to not understanding others, but he wanted to know Ash better. He wanted to understand this strange boy, who perhaps knew how to fight for corners, and walked through life followed by ghosts.

After a free breakfast that deserved to be free, they met a young couple heading their way. By early evening, they were in New Orleans.

New Orleans felt magical, in the way most places do when lit up by color and vibrant nightlife. Everywhere he looked, something new and interesting got his attention, the air thick with alcohol and ghostly spirits. The streets glowed from neon lights as saxophones sang in clubs, and Shorter felt the excitement permeate his bones.

Peering at Ash from over the rim of his sunglasses, Shorter smiled. “Ready to party?” he asked. Ash simply grunted.

“Come on, we’re gonna have some fun.” He reached into the pocket of his jacket, removing a piece of folded paper. Carefully, he opened it, revealing the contents. "When I was in DC, I met a dude whose cousin runs a club. Told me to hit them up, get some free drinks.”

Studying the street signs to compare addresses, Shorter began following the sidewalk made rainbow with neon. Ash simply followed, as quiet as the night before.

Kilimanjaro was a shithole but had a nice porch. Yellow lights strung through the canopy, fenced in by local ferns, and crappy paintings of mountains wrapped in plastic. Topless women in neon lit a small crowd of tables nestled under umbrellas, while an actual topless bar kept busy next door. The club seemed to have some kind of connection to the bar, as visitors moved from one to another, girls in tight crop-tops loitering outside with their cigarettes.

Ash immediately went for a seat, scratching the chair against the concrete. He sat, staring past the umbrellas into a crowd of dancing, drinking partiers doused in yellow light.

“I’ll go get us drinks. You got a preference?” When he didn’t answer, Shorter shrugged, then left for the bar.

Behind the counter, a bartender, an aging punk with green hair and two pierced eyebrows, cleaned a row of glasses. He grinned wildly at Shorter, speaking in a lovely creole accent. “What will ya have, my friend?”

Shorter cleared his throat. "Give me something that will fuck me up.”

He laughed. “You a tourist?”

“Yup.”

“Then you’ll want a Hurricane.” Removing a curved glass from the table, he got to work. The lamp-shaped glass filled with ice and blood-red spirits.

“I’ll have two.”

“Right on!” When Shorter tried to pay, the guy waved him off. "Just get fucked up and have some fun. First two are on me.”

“Thanks, man," he genuinely smiled. "Have a good one.” The bartender returned the gesture, then got busy with his next customer. Shorter returned to Ash, who remained still like a soldier, placing the drinks on the table.

“What is this?” He asked, studying the glass.

“Guy said it’s called a Hurricane. I dunno, try it.”

Ash sipped through the straw, then licked his lips. “It’s good,” he said, then took another. He spun the straw, ice clinking against the glass.

Shorter took a mouthful of his own. It /was/ good; tart and fruity, but strong, one of those drinks that fucked you up quietly. He took a long sip.

“Goddamn,” he said, then clinked the glass. “Tonight, I’m gonna get laid.” So many pretty girls moved in the club, he was bound to score eventually.

“Good luck,” Ash murmured.

“Hey, don’t be mean. Not everybody has your kind of fortune, my friend.”

Ash snorted, then buried himself in his drink. At least he was talking again, even if his replies were sharp and short.

Halfway through his drink, pressure filled up his bladder, and Shorter shifted. "I gotta piss," he said. "Be right back." Ash made no response and continued to sip his drink quietly.

Making his way to the restroom gave him a better idea of the club and its parts. Dark and crowded, thick music wet his ears in a brain numbed by alcohol. As the chorus got going, it took him a minute to remember what he originally set off to do in the first place.

The bathrooms were set in the back of a hall covered with beaded drapes. A couple of women sat outside the doors, checking their makeup, talking amongst themselves. He glanced them over before pushing open the door to the men's room.

Three stalls and two urinals greeted him, completely covered in harsh, mediocre graffiti. One of the urinals already had an occupant, so he took the open bowl. He chuckled when he realized that the ceramic was painted to look like Ronald Reagan opening his mouth.

The neighbor finished and washed his hands, then seemed to wait by the sink. Shorter finished, joining him in pumping soap into his palms. As he rubbed his hands together, he paused.

This guy, he'd never seen anyone like him. He had a long, sort of vulpine face made soft with makeup, framed by strikingly black hair kept neatly in a bun. Fat, red eyeliner made his indigo-black eyes burn. He smiled at Shorter and leaned against the counter, showing off his tight women's blouse. If it weren't for the prominent Adam's apple bobbing down his throat, he would have thought him a woman.

"Hey," he said, in a voice thickly sweet. Hong Kong British, Shorter realized. It took a moment for him to realize that it was not directed at him, but a woman who had come out of one of the stalls.

She was kind of pretty, Shorter thought. Tall, straw-colored hair pulled tightly into a ponytail. It was enough to distract him from wondering what she was doing in the men's restroom.

"Uh," he squeaked. She gave a smile, then took the sink. Her blouse was low, and he could see the round protrusion of her breasts. He swallowed.

"Sorry," she began soaping her hands, "I just didn't want to wait in line. There's never one for the men's room."

"Okay," he replied dumbly. She dried her hands and noticed his stare.

Her friend spoke first. "Think he likes you. That's too bad." He pushed away a stray piece of hair from his eyes. "I was going to take him."

"Oh," Shorter said. God, the alcohol was making him dumb.

"Oh," she repeated, almost a jibe. He followed them out of the bathroom back into the club, where the music got louder and faster. The woman swayed on her feet, obviously a little drunk.

"You want to dance?" A statement more than a question. He nodded, and she took his hand, firm and tight.

"I'll get us more drinks." Her friend stated. Moving in closer, he trailed a finger down Shorter's chest. He squirmed uncomfortably, and his new date giggled. "You," he began, "Did you come with friends?"

"Uh, one," Shorter replied, and pushed his hand away.

"Oh?"

"He's uh, like you. You know." The man looked amused, either out of a potential date, or Shorter's baseless assumption. It was difficult to tell which.

"Is he?" A finger went to his painted lips, and he hummed. "Well, maybe introduce me later."

"Sure. I'll uh, I'll talk to him."

A tight smirk and he turned towards the bar. The woman, who introduced herself as Nicole, pulled Shorter towards the porch.

"Sorry about Yousiss," she said. "He's always a cranky bitch when he's drunk. It's been even worse, now that he hasn't gotten laid in a few days." She pulled her hair out of a black scrunchie, making it fall past her shoulders. "Maybe your friend can help him cool off."

Shorter imagined Ash meeting Yousiss. Ash seemed to have a taste for older men, but they never talked about that sort of thing. Yousiss seemed like oil to Ash's water, but none of that stuff ever mattered in the bedroom. He just wanted his friend to have fun.

"I can show you a good time," she said, a hand on his chest. Her fingernails glimmered under the yellow light, red and bright. His pants were getting tight and he squirmed. When he breathed through his nose, she already knew what his answer would be. "Ten dollars, I'll make you scream."

He had ten dollars.

At the edge of the porch, Ash saw him. Green eyes watched as he exchanged the money, and Shorter smiled sheepishly. Quickly, Ash looked away, and Shorter disappeared into the shadows of the neighboring building.

"Never do this before?" She smiled.

He didn't answer, his knees were weak. The hormones must have been gleaming through his face because he could feel the temperature in his body rising.

"It's fine," she continued. Her hands jerked down his pants and stopped them at the hips, sensitive areas tasting the air. When he shivered, her hands traveled to the front of his underwear.

It felt wonderful, to be touched by another person. Human heat made his body feel foreign and feral, made him gasp and squirm. Moreso, it dissipated his loneliness.

Coming felt great, but brought him back to reality. She smiled from between his legs, wiping her face clean. Suddenly, he was back in an alley with his pants down. He leaned against the brick and panted, feeling the afterglow leave his groin. This didn't feel the way he thought it would.

Rising to her feet, she brushed the hair out of her face, and Shorter's brain became fuzzy. What the hell was he supposed to say to her? Give a compliment, maybe offer to buy her a drink? Say thank you?

"Thanks," he settled on.

"Sure, hun." A compact mirror flipped open, and she checked her makeup. "Did you want another go?"

"Actually," Shorter said, awkward and slightly shy, "I thought, maybe I could buy you a drink."

"If you want," she hummed. "Though, I have some things to take care of first."

"Sure. Yeah, I get it."

Finishing up her makeup, she snapped the mirror shut. Her eyes looked him over expectantly as if waiting for him to move. Fidgetting, he buckled his pants and took a step back. "Guess I'll see you then." She didn't answer.

Shorter found Ash still at the table, slumped over two glasses full of ice. He played with the straw in-between his fingers, bending it back and forth.

"Hey."

Ash looked up with his eyes, then turned back to the empty drink. He was definitely drunk.

"You okay?" Shorter asked. "Have you really been here this whole time?"

"Short-er," Ash drawled. His eyes didn't leave the straw twirling in the ice. Under the string of lights, they both looked red.

"Yeah, buddy?"

"I think..." For a moment, he almost looked sick. "I think the world is ending."

Shorter sat across the table, smiling sympathetically. "Nah, you're just drunk."

"I read it in the paper," Ash said, defensive and slow. "Said the world is gonna end in 50 years."

"Everyone is so negative."

"It makes sense to me. Everyone is cruel or dying of AIDS." He sipped from a straw, more ice than alcohol. “Everyone is gonna die."

"Well, every day the world ends for somebody. Guess in fifty years, it won't be much different."

"This _is_ different," he stressed.

This had to stop. He was going to make sure Ash had a good time, no matter what.

Shorter tapped his shoulder. “Hey, what do you think of that one?"

Ash followed his finger. He spotted Nicole, standing with Yousiss near the bar.

"What," edginess filled his voice. "That girl you were just with?"

"No, her friend.” He pointed to Yousiss. "He's gay, you know."

Ash's eyes turned sharp. He looked back to his cup, making the ice rattle. "Just let me drink, Shorter."

"He wants to meet you."

Ash surprised Shorter by clicking his tongue in harsh annoyance. Frowning, he propped his face on his hand, then stared at his friend questionably.

"I just want you to have some fun, Ash."

"Then let me drink."

Shorter leaned back in his seat, unsure of what to say. Thankfully, he didn't have to decide, as the familiar tapping of heels diverted his attention.

"I'll take that drink now," Nicole announced and took a seat.

“This your friend?” Yousiss sat next to Ash, crossing a leg over the opposite knee. The red makeup over his eyes sparkled.

"He's cute," Nicole said, and Shorter gave Ash an encouraging look.

"I'll get the drinks," he looked between the three. "Beer?"

Ash only cared about turning that straw into a mangled mess, and Nicole shrugged. Yousiss however, scoffed. "Martinis."

Shorter's brain had begun to sober up, but not enough to speak his mind. Straight enough to be annoyed, too drunk to tell an asshole to shove it.

"How's your night going?" The punk asked when he returned to the bar. Everything about the club was busier, the bar thick with guests. Shorter had to raise his voice to be heard.

"Not bad," he called.

The bartender's eyes smiled at his lazy speech. "Drink do you good?"

"Yeah. Actually, came to get a few more." Shorter pointed to the full table. "Got a date."

"Good for you, kid." Four more curvy glasses filled with rum. Shorter carried them through the crowd, only to be met with a sorry sight.

On his feet was Ash, eyes white with hot rage. Yousiss gaped at him, thin face contorted with disgust.

“Don’t fucking touch me!” Ash spat. Everything about him looked tight, like a feral, hissing cat. Shorter had seen Ash angry before, but this felt different. Something was off, dangerous.

"Jesus Christ," hissed Yousiss. "Fucking psycho."

"Shorter," looking at him with hard eyes, Nicole rolled her tongue. "Your friend is a total nutjob."

Ash had his fingers at his waistband, where Shorter knew he kept a knife. This got him moving. Taking a step forward, he kept his voice calm. "Ash--"

His body shook, jittery like a skeleton. Ash's voice kept the same shakiness. "Back the fuck off, Shorter."

Shorter turned to the other two, his mind whirling. "What the fuck happened?" He demanded.

"Just let him go," Yousiss' arms were crossed, visibly annoyed. The growing number of eyes on the altercation from others in the bar only seemed to increase his agitation. "Boy is a total prude."

Looking back to ask Ash himself, he found him gone. Startled, Shorter deposited the drinks on the table, then quickly left the porch. It wasn't difficult to find him, walking fast, blonde hair shining in the dark.

"Ash..! Wait, Ash!"

Ash lit a cigarette as he walked, his feet fast.

He caught up quickly, but Ash didn't slow down. "Dude, are you really leaving?"

"I'm not staying here."

Shorter knew that at some point, Ash might run off. He expected it, was aware of its imminence. But now faced with that reality, he couldn't let it happen.

"Then let me come with you," he said, hard and sincere. Ash stopped walking, those green eyes of his glowing under the streetlight. They stood like that for a moment.

Ash shuffled his feet, shoved his hands into his pockets. "What happened to enjoying a pair of tits?"

"They can wait." A pause, then Ash began to walk again, this time at a normal pace. Shorter kept in time by his side.

"I didn't mean to upset you," he insisted.

Ash replied quickly. "I know."

"I just wanted for you to have a good time."

"I _know_."

Shorter followed Ash out of the French Quarter, onto a quieter street. He seemed to be following the rails of the streetcar, where he knew a spot to get back onto the highway. After a few minutes, he apparently changed his mind, as he settled on a bench. In a nearby club, jazz music drifted into the street.

Shorter watched him, this scruffy figure hunched over and bathed in blue light. He looked like a sad Hopper painting.

"Why did you follow me out here?" Ash asked.

_That_ got under his skin. Shorter couldn't believe it, the nerve of this kid. "Are you fucking stupid?" He scowled. "I haven't walked hundreds of miles with you for over a week, just so you can question our friendship." Ash didn't respond, so he continued. "I know that's not very long, but I still care about you."

That seemed to snap something in the boy, who jumped to his feet. He opened his mouth, determined to say something, but struggled. His tongue stumbled over the words until he finally managed to get something out.

"I'm pissed at you!" He screamed. His foot slammed on the cement.

Shorter frowned, confused. "Why?

"Because you're a fucking asshole!"

"Whoa." He was still too drunk for this. "That was mean."

"So was going off with that floozy!"

For a split second, something abstract in Shorter's brain seemed to make sense. "Ash," he smiled sadly. "Are you jealous?"

When the words left his mouth, he immediately regretted them. Ash leaped off his feet like a wild, crazed cat. A strong, tight punch landed on Shorter's jaw, and both men fell to the concrete.

"The fuck--" Grabbing his fist, Shorter attempted to subdue the teen, but Ash proved to be wily and fierce. With bared teeth, he attempted to bite the exposed flesh of his arm. Shorter jerked, his elbows hitting the cement. "What the fuck!"

Yanking his shoulders back, he managed to get ahold of Ash's arms, forcing him onto his stomach. He punched the air, tried to scratch and kick him, screamed like a wild animal. Being larger and stronger, Shorter managed to keep him in place, but it was like wrestling with a slippery fish.

"Ash, hey!" He yelled, "what the hell has gotten into you?"

"Why are you like them?" Ash demanded. His eyes, once hot and angry, were now red with tears. Shorter's grip tightened, before letting go. Ash crawled away, then wiped at his wet face.

Shorter didn't understand. "What?"

"You slept with that girl," Ash's body shook. It looked like he could break at any moment. "You fucking slept with her. I saw you pay her."

A heavy silence and Shorter struggled to figure out what to say. He knew Ash had seen him, but at the moment, everything had seemed fine.

"Ash." He tried to choose his words carefully, but there was no talking around this. "They're just, doing the same thing you do." It was the first time Shorter ever acknowledged Ash's supposed profession.

The pregnant pause that followed seemed almost unbearable, and the pit in Shorter's stomach grew. Something manifested in Ash's face, indiscernible and sad.

"Because people like us have nothing else," he finally said, bitter and sharp. "Because we're desperate. You think I'm living out some hippie fantasy, traveling the country sucking dick?"

"I don't..." He wasn't sure what to say. Not once, did he ever think of Ash not enjoying what he did. At that moment, life felt like that stupid Rubik’s cube. So many chances to make mistakes, in so many combinations.

No words seemed adequate, so he said the only thing that sounded right.

"I'm sorry."

Ash's eyes wavered, then blinked away tears.

"I'm really sorry," Shorter repeated. "I'm just an idiot."

"No," Ash closed his eyes, holding it. The tears grew thicker on his cheeks. "I'm just messed up."

"Hey, it's okay. I'm fucked up too, you know."

"I didn't..." Wiping his face, Ash sniffed and stuttered. "I'm not actually mad at you."

"It's cool if you are."

"I'm not. I'm... I don't even know who I'm mad at. I'm just angry."

For a few heavy moments, they sat in silence, until a faint rumble resonated in the far distance. A storm, close by.

Ash turned on his knees to face Shorter, green eyes wide with remorse. "I'm sorry I hit you," he said, the words sad and sincere. "Are you okay?"

"It's cool," Shorter touched his lip, where it had begun to swell. He smirked. "Who knew you had such a good arm?"

Ash smiled through the tears, and Shorter helped him up. An angry boom vibrated in the sky, then cracked open, bright and angry. They looked at each other.

"Let's get out of here." Shorter shrugged back on his coat, then started back towards the highway. A mile down waited a motel, where they would spend the remainder of their money. In the morning, they would figure out what to do.

The road lay desolate at this hour, utterly clean of life. When the rain started, the tar glowed and sparkled under the street lights.

Ash's blonde hair clung wetly to his face, the cheap cat shirt tight around his skinny body. He walked, slightly hunched over, kicking up puddles. Around them, the rain drummed against the pavement. He surprised Shorter by breaking the silence, humming a tune.

Ash began moving to his own beat, doing more kicks, moving his arms.

"Life goin' nowhere--" a stomp in a puddle, a kick, "somebody help me." Their eyes locked.

Shorter stared, and Ash mischievously grinned. He spread out his arms wide, beginning to walk backwards into the road. "Somebody help me, yeah!"

Observing, Shorter watched Ash reach the middle of the highway, silhouetted by street lights and rain. He looked up into the sky and spun.

"Life goin' nowhere, somebody help me. Somebody help me, yeah!" Kicking a large puddle, Ash jumped into it, before belting out a chorus. "I'm stayin' alive!"

Fucking. Bee Gees.

"Ash!" Shorter yelled. "Get out of the road."

Ash was screaming now, spinning and moving through the rain. The lights of a car burned in the distance, and Shorter's chest tightened. Ash only laughed when the horn blared and hummed past. "Ah, ha, ha, ha, stayin' alive!"

This kid was fucking insane.

He looked back at Shorter, illuminated and glowing. His fingers reached out as far as they could, and he smiled, wide and true. It was beautiful and infectious.

Well, there was nobody out here to ruin his punk cred.

"Life goin' nowhere!" Shorter screamed into the road.

"Somebody help me!" Ash called back.

"Somebody help me, yeah yeah yeah!"

He joined Ash in the road, moving his body, spinning, yelling into the night.

"We're staying alive!" Ash screamed into the storm, and Shorter smiled.

"We're stayin' alive!" He agreed.

Shorter thought how, if he had to die again, he'd be okay with it being beside Ash on the highway, dancing in the rain.


	4. You

these miles and miles

are fuck all but

old radio stations

who play nothing but white noise

and dusty roads

that serve dollar meals

bones of gas stations

where neon ghosts live

broken yard signs

with pumps so rusty

that even oil

can't make money there

you, who smoked a cigarette

to fill the nothingness with something

held up your hands

and became one with the utility poles

in those miles of crosses

where a soul can be crucified

with the phone calls and the telegraphs

you, who told me

how god lives in a crack on the interstate

near a sign that reads

120 texarkana

you, who says

he lets us walk all over him because

there's not much he can do

about us, in our cities

in our brains

in-between the molecules

(tell me, did you notice the ant

crawling up your kicks?

he asks,

then boots a rock.)

you, who have seen a childhood through a windshield

and left memories to rot in the upholstery

a tongue salty with semen

a belly full of what cost some

fat asshole

$50, as of 1985

(sell me your innocence and ten minutes

for a piece of paper

that means nothing

in another country)

you, who says

your soul is like a lizard

basking from one rock

to another

a deer at a salt lick

you, who says

this love

is the only one some know

how you've tried

so many times

to pick off the skin and let it peel

(so your soul could be something else)

you, who feels a smile

is more valuable than

any part of you

others can touch

even if they could push their thumbs

down deep into the shell of your skull

into the wrinkles of grey matter

into the wrinkles of

you, who stole the soap

at some moldy motel 6

then went back for the bible

desperate to read something

not a dusty old road sign

you, who sat by my side

all the way down 66

where you taught me

one billion seconds is about 32 years

and how to say "fuck you"

(in french)

all the way through towns

even more insignificant than us

speckled with homes that sold for

less than the night

the guy on TV

spent at a hotel

all the way up hills

painted with wheat

swampy rivers

and copperheads

rice and blue flowers

where we stopped

for cans of pepsi

whose skeletons got sold

to that shady fuck on the corner

so we could buy a hotdog

at a dead-end

rotting rest stop

in Paris, Texas.


	5. The Invisible Man

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Three kinds of ghost stories.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry for the wait on this one. I got busy with work, family problems, writer’s block blah blah. 
> 
> This chapter is a little strange. Some of you are probably familiar with how I’m looking to turn this story into a book, so this chapter is experimenting with some of the ideas I’m going to put into it. Regardless, I hope you enjoy, and thank you so much for all of your very kind comments! You guys keep me going. ☺️
> 
> Finally, special thanks to Coop, who kept me on my toes for the past few weeks with our writing sprints/book club. This chapter is dedicated to her, because I don’t know if it would have gotten done otherwise.

Preface

Thirty-five years from today (1985), a paper will be written in New York about the process the human brain goes through during and after death. It explains, among other things, that much of what one experiences during a NDE (near-death episode) is the result of a furious cacophony of boiling brain soup.

In 1952, a man in Oregon died for ten minutes after a sudden heart attack. As his corpse lay at the foot of his driveway, splayed across the pavement, his consciousness floated upwards through a sea thick as butter. He could feel his being detach from a knowing and tangible self, dissociating into that hearty soup of cosmic consciousness. Later, he would explain how he understood time had ceased to exist, that its absence left behind air thick enough to chew.

In 1997, a stroke victim in Kansas walked through a bright light and met Jesus Christ. He wore the same trainers she wore to bowling every week, and with a soft voice he kindly complimented her hair. When he spoke, geometric shapes flowed from his mouth like fire, drifting through rows of perfectly white teeth. Before he could tell her about the many dishes waiting for her at the welcoming potluck, she woke under a different light with a tube down her throat.

All of this is true, at least to the extent that the living can understand it; after all, there is much to be said about a topic that is understood so little, even by death’s most seasoned veterans. However, the living are relatively decent at summing up what can already be adequately understood, even if there is a need to romanticize it a bit.

Take for example the previously mentioned article, which I forgot to mention is actually about pigs. So, try to imagine a slaughterhouse thick with the bodies of squealing, sweaty swine. You’re one of those bodies, a fat creature with a soft, puckered snout and a belly so wide, that your body bloats like a balloon full of meat.

You haven’t had much of a life, but you still had one. There were the smells of humans and other pigs, the taste of cheap grain, the metallic odor of blood. Eventually, your life ends in the way that most pigs do: upside down with a hole in your throat. It takes only twenty-seconds for your personality to blink out, hushed like a candle snuffer on a fresh wick. Scientists reach into the cavity of your skull to remove what remains of you, a shell of spongy grey matter. This last proof of your being, of your consciousness, is placed into the stomach of a specialty freezer.

Four hours after death, your brain is pumped full of a synthetic serum. Instead of deteriorating into another piece of meat, the cellular metabolism of your brain sparks back into motion. Your neurons spark like a lighter low on fluid, unable to create anything substantial, but still provoking the existence of _something._

I think about those creatures sometimes, wonder what happened to them. Where, what, are those pigs now? Did a resurgence of brain activity change who they were, or simply produce sparks in an otherwise empty engine? More unnervingly, did something new form in that space once occupied by another?

Personalities may die in the first few seconds of death, but what once was needs to go somewhere. Energy cannot be created or destroyed, but it can change shape, evolve and shift. Everything that made up me while I was alive has simply faded from its previous form into something different, something that the living have no proper word for. Like all things people cannot understand, these concepts are given mythological origins. So, for all intents and purposes, I'll call myself a ghost.

___________

I read once that there is nothing more American than a ghost story. In the kitchens, in the graveyards, in the miles of blood-soaked cotton fields and knotty wired fences, ghosts grow plentiful and angry. People have a tendency to fill up empty things, after all; jars, silence, calendars, the opposite ends of a bed. This habit, it doesn't stop when you die. This is filling up something too.

Heroin was my thing. So, when I died, I did what I knew best: I closed my eyes, stilled, then let the high of non-existence move me along like a directionless river.

Maybe in my haze I walked from Vietnam, perhaps crossing oceans on my bare feet. The high of non-existence would have made that journey laughably effortless, just as the heroin had made life for a time. But there are only so many generations one can wander in the miasma of death, until memories return with a crude, unexpected force.

When I woke from my haze it was 1985 and suddenly I remembered what I was. That's not to say I thought I was alive, because I didn't. But I remembered how I could be more than simply matter and energy, that little pieces of myself still lingered in that world, in the memories of the living.

Death shows itself differently to everyone. For me, death appeared as a line of doors; flush doors, lipped doors, sliding glass doors, doors with rococo patterns and doors with diamond grills, doors that I would never have a name for. Rows of them, sorted like a chain of gravestones.

An unimpressive, white four-paneled door kept my interest, it’s edges glowing with daylight. I ran my hand along the edges of the seems, watching the sun play on my fingers until they reached door knob, rusty and covered in splatters of white paint. When I turned, I stepped out into the streets of downtown Boston.

I wasn't sure how I got to the door labeled with a “D et D,” but the road ended and it looked like the right place. The room itself, an abandoned office space filled with the skeletons of rusty aluminum chairs, smelled stale with age. A menagerie of ghosts, about a dozen of them, sat in a circle and listened to an old man talk about his life.

“I died on my birthday,” he laughed. His leg was missing up to his knee and the raw stump wobbled as his chest bobbed up and down. “The bomb that got me here,” a hand slapped the jointless thigh, “eventually got me here.” A finger pointed to his brain. “Aneurysm.”

I used that moment of silence to find my own seat. A large clump of orange mud had begun to form in plaques on my elbow, so while the old man waxed his story I picked at it with my fingernails. It was useless, like chipping at stone with a toothpick, so I quickly became bored and turned instead to take stock of the others in the room. Soldiers are always making a habit out of sizing up rooms, always aware of an exit.

“Seems we got some fresh faces,” said one man. Blatantly military, he spread his arms to point towards the crowd. For a dead man, he seemed remarkably clean, skin free from the tattoos of age or injury. His tight military haircut eclipsed a thin, serious face, brightened only by a pair of warm eyes. He introduced himself as Sergeant 1st Class Quincy Brown, said how he would be running things, and somehow I knew right away that he had been dead for longer than the rest of us.

A nervous young guy stood at the chair next to me now, lanky and trembling in a pair of issued fatigues. He hovered with his head to the side, a piece of thick bandage over a gaping hole that kept the pieces of his brain and skull inside. A gunshot wound.

“I don't really need what's inside anymore," he told the group sheepishly, pointing a thin finger to the graying bandage, “but I don't like seeing the yuck all over the floor."

The bandage looked scabby yet moist, and I held my tongue when I noticed the gooey bits of blood and brain dripping steadily from his hair. At his feet, a small puddle began to form.

When he noticed the bits on the floor, his eyes turned frog-like behind the thick pair of BCGs. Startled, he began stuttering and shaking in embarrassment.

“I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” he groaned. “I’ll clean it up.”

“Don’t worry about it,” Brown replied. “Just go ahead and take your seat.”

He hesitated but obliged, scuffling towards the empty seat at my right. The chair audibly screeched, which only seemed to further his embarrassment. Shrinking into the chair, his head and shoulders slumped to the side like a rag doll. I tried not to notice the eternal dripping from his head, but he ground his teeth with a strange click-click, and my eyes felt forced to wander. Those glasses made him look like a ventriloquist dummy.

"I'm sorry," he said, a quiet and afraid apology.

"It's really alright," Brown’s tone remained soft, genuine. "The burdens of life that follow us into death can be difficult to bear. That's why we're here." He cleared his throat. "I guess I should say, welcome to the Boston chapter of the Vietnam Veterans of America.” The group murmured in response. “Let’s start with the usual business. Tyrone, you said there was something you wanted to say to the group?”

Tyrone, a young guy who couldn’t be much older than me, leaned forward and shrugged. “I just wanted to tell everyone how the hole here,” he rubbed his chest, “Has finally gone away. It has to be because of you guys. I really think, soon I’ll be able to move on. I think I’m getting there.”

One of the other soldiers huffed. “All of you are so damn set on ‘moving on.’”

“Yeah, well. I think I’m ready for something new. I’m not afraid of it anymore.” He chuckled. “And not having my organs all over the seat anymore is nice.” When everyone laughed, he grinned wryly. “You laugh, but it’s true. That mine ripped open my guts, man. Try sitting on your stomach sometime.”

More laughter, then Brown cleared his throat. “Well, then— if nobody has anything else to say, let’s get started. Do you want to go first?" He looked at the kid, who seemed to be attempting to disappear into his seat. It took a long second for him to respond.

"I don’t really want to talk," he admitted. His hands shook oddly, and he clenched his teeth tight to keep them from chattering. "I just didn’t want to be alone anymore. I couldn't be alone anymore."

"That's fine," Brown repeated. "We all come to accept death in our own time. The living are given this chance, no reason we can't be afforded the same decency."

The other soldiers in the room audibly agreed, which seemed to make him relax. However, he remained visibly nervous, tapping a foot in time with his chattering teeth. At least that greasy wound on his head had begun to congeal. I hated myself for how uncomfortable he made me feel.

“Remember, coming here is the most difficult part. We all face doubts and struggle with acceptance. The religious of us may grapple with holding onto our faiths in our new bodies, as everything outside of ourselves now feels less viable. We can’t see God or experience the closure we expected.

“Others of us, we take the soldier’s heart to our graves, but seek a way to dispose of them. Either way, you have come here to find peace, and we’ve come together to learn to understand, grow and accept responsibility for our lives. The best thing for ourselves and our loved ones is to figure out what is keeping us here, so everyone can move on and find something better.”

"We'll get to our other newbie, then. What’s your name?”

A chorus of welcomes followed and I smiled through my nervousness. Suddenly, I felt jittery as a rabbit, and my tongue knotted. I bobbed my knee and that herd of eyes bore hard on me until the silence expected me to break it. That clicking continued. Click-click-click.

“I’m Griffin Callenreese,” I managed. It was the first time in almost ten years that I had spoken and my throat felt coarse as gravel.

“Where you serve?”

“Mekong Delta, part of the cleanup crew,” I replied.

In our helmets and military cosmetics, we looked like mangy tigers in BCGs, prowling through canopies ripe with human fruit. This jungle, which smelled of fuel and heat, that seasoned our uniforms with blood, sweat and bacterial infections, made wildcats out of kittens.

In Vietnam, I smoked a pack an hour.

"Nasty business,” Brown said, and he meant it.

The last few months of my life were spent wrapping bodies in paper and cloth to save them from the jungle sun. We worked with the pieces of our friends, like slabs of meat in a butcher shop. A shovel with a broken handle sweated and blistered the insides of my palms. The weakest of us dug into the slimes of human excrement, even with the mask over my face we could feel the heat of it. For a member of the cleanup crew, everything was shit and blood.

"I was.."

"Am, Griffin. We’re dead, not gone.”

"I am, will be, nineteen-years-old."

I could sense the mud growing tighter on my skin, as if it could bury and protect me from these people who wanted to see my body this naked and vulnerable.

"This is your first day, so tell us something. How you got here, maybe what your family was like."

"It would take too long,” I said, “and I don’t know if what I’m able to talk about really means anything. There’s not much I want to say about the war. At least, not right now.”

Brown probably heard this many times before, because he nodded. “Time is for the living, you know,” those words seemed clinical, definitely practiced. “Take as long as you need. As for that other stuff, don’t worry about it. We’re not here to tell war stories, we’re here because our shared experiences makes our recovery unique.”

“Okay,” I nodded, then began to speak.

[

My mother died after my brother was born.

Suicide, not childbirth. She didn’t have the baby.

I don't know much about her. I never got old enough to know her. My father carried his own elusiveness, shedding that shell only when he hit the bottle too hard. It took until my eighteenth birthday, when I received a letter from the government, for him to mutter even a word about Korea. Those words did not mean as much as I thought they would, unlike his fantastical stories, which affected me deeply despite the malice in them.

His favorite to tell Aslan and I was about our Grandmother, which he almost always did when we misbehaved. He used to say, she only made it to America because of a deal she made with the devil; that if we were bad, she’d swoop down from the sky and raise us as her own in a bird’s nest.

Aslan was too cynical for these tales, but I grew up a kid who could be scared into believing that potatoes would grow out of his dirty ears. I feared her, and as a small child often peered anxiously out my window, squinting with great effort to find a floating black figure in the darkness.

She had a reputation on the cape, a string of mythologies that came from the mouths of babushka women. Often they began with her birth in a small village of Northern Ireland, the daughter of charcoal burners. From her father to little sister, ashes got baked into their skins from head to toe, permanently staining their eyes with black eyeliner. Anyone in town knew when they were around, because their footsteps were laced with dirt.

This is how the Callenreeses’ got our working spirit, my father said. It's cooked into our blood, has made our feet and hands hard with ash and ancestral memory.

Great-Grandpa considered himself something of an artist, even if he only became one around his children. Pieces of the charcoal got made into pencils and tools, rough supplies wrapped in paper sheathes. He did little sketches, a menagerie of portraits and sketchy animals, a skill which he would pass on to his daughter.

As a child, her body became so ashy, she could draw on the floor with her fingers. My father would say, when she drew, sometimes the drawings would come true. But art is subjective; or at least, that's what she would claim when something went wrong, that the universe did not always read her intentions correctly. That’s what happened when she drew a picture of the devil and the drawing spoke to her. This is when it really started, my father claimed, when everything went to shit. He blamed everything on his mother.

“In a year, the country will split in two,” said the devil. “If you stay, your family will die.”

Of course, most people do not trust the devil right away. The drawing got put into a pile, stacked beneath sketches of plants and scratchy mountains.

Only when the fields lit up like yellow flames, richly dotted with pea flowers that smelled of coconut, did she remember the drawing. The picture lay, crinkled and smeary with charcoal, under a handful of half-drawn Wicklow gorse.

“I can assure your lineage stays healthy and strong,” he said. “All I ask for in return, is your loyalty.”

Just as my grandmother’s stomach began to grow, my grandfather clutched his chest and died. That night he ended up on the kitchen floor in a puddle of milk, his fingers gripped around the jar neck, frozen like a doll. His eyes bulged, drool and blood seeped from his face.

It's strange; being dead, these memories feel inherited, like part of my DNA. I can see him now, walking down the steps of that old house, his body visible from the hall.

That’s why, the words from the devil gave her comfort instead of fear. Health and longevity are good motivators, especially for those who don’t have it.

On the eve Ireland would see civil war, she fled with the baby in her stomach, and from a dock in New York rode in a carriage to the cape of Massachusetts.

She first noticed it in the mirror. Her skin, once plump and pearly white, began to thin and turn translucent as filo dough, until tiny dark spines sprouted from her shoulders. Like black stems, they were soft and pleasant to the touch.

Under her delicate dresses, they continued to grow, turning itchy and sore. Some nights, her finger’s would elongate and her nose became sharp, turning thick and dark. In the mornings, black feathers would fall from the folds of her dress, following her around the house like little black petals.

Each night her skin would dry a little more, aging and crinkling like parchment, until one night, she discovered how to shed it. Her human skin slipped off her shoulders and amassed at her ankles. Just as steadily, she learned to reuse her arms like wings, and with that instinct taught her how to fly.

The first night she tasted the sky, she realized her inability to control the devil’s tastes. On a shoddy porch overgrown with beach grass, a fat tomcat slept in a beam of sun. She ripped him from the earth with her sharp new claws, and the skin felt so pleasantly soft, so eerily fragile, that when the fresh blood dripped down her beak, she realized never before had she tasted anything so profoundly wonderful.

When the feathers molted away like snakeskin, she regained enough of her humanity to understand the horror of a bloody house cat on her windowsill. It’s grey ticked coat glisteninhned under the red of fresh claw marks. But, like all terrible things in life, you learn to live with your new circumstances, and this strangeness eventually became banal.

During the day, a deck of thick, hand-painted tarot cards earned the family a meal a day and placated the curiosities of the Russian and Slavic wives who would gather at her stoop.

During the night, she made nests from rosaries, bits of paper and cigarettes. Sometimes, the devil got to her and she would steal a chicken. In the mornings, she picked the bones out of her nests and boiled them down for stock.

My father grew up in this home, a house where bundles of onions and tassels weaved from hair, bells, and string hung from every corner of the house. Cinnamon and anise kept burning in a pan on the stove, mixing with the sweetness of fresh bread. Looking down on it all loomed the staircase, clumsy and ill-made, but anointed by a large stained-glass window depicting Jesus and Mary. The only thing my father probably hated more than his mother was this window.

He had nightmares about this window. The crucifix, the weeping mother, the birds with accidental red eyes. That staircase, it looked down on an open floor plan, and I could imagine the light bouncing off the painted glass, reflecting a menagerie of colors onto the emptiness below.

One morning, my father woke to a house empty of the stench of anise, empty of noise, empty of his mother. At the top of the staircase, the light hit the window just right, shedding a litter of red hue onto the floor below.

The neighbor greeted him on his way out. “Tell your Mama that I found what was killing all our chickens,” he said. “Caught a black bird tryin’ to make off with one of mine last night. I shot ‘em down, though.”

In the yard he found it, saw the black bird crumbled like a broken spider in the dirt, a dried bullet hole in its head.

It all sounds like a fairy tale, doesn’t it? Maybe it is. People like me don’t become storytellers because of an interest in the truth. If I were to speak the truth, it would be about the rumors of an old babushka woman and her fear of Irishmen. That the rumors hurt less than whatever happened to my father’s mother that night. He needed this story.

This tale explains where I come from. My friends could weave their histories through oral DNA, census papers and what their dead left behind. It gathered in mounds of clothing and empty houses, in chests full of blankets and a grandfather’s antiques, in photographs and yellowed letters with elegant script. They could name these things, could tell stories about where each piece came from and where they would go. Me, I come from generations of illiteracy, silence and ghost stories. I only knew what my father wanted me to know, and most of what he knew probably got lost in a bottle.

It’s strange to think about how, in death, I’m no longer bound to the restrictions of my earthly knowledge. That now, I could know anything I ever wanted about the puzzle pieces of my ancestral narrative. But these stories are my history, and there is a deep fear of replacing them. Maybe I don’t want to be a nobody, and I think these stories make me somebody. Maybe I’m somebody who might find feathers under his skin someday.

TS Eliot once said, “Human kind cannot bear very much reality...”

Death comes to me in doors. One of the first doors l went through, a half-glass door, let me see out into suburbia; into a world where convenience stores advertised model train sets, where tiny homes with rusty yellow and blue roofs dotted a landscape sprinkled by the red of churches.

On the other side of the door, I found Aslan. He looked older now, face sharpened by puberty and that straw-colored hair a shade darker. His eyes were still the same, green and sharp as cut gemstones.

It wasn’t Massachusetts anymore. He stood, wobbly as new teenagers are, in oversized jeans, a t-shirt covered in sharpie, and jewelry that turned his white wrists green. A cigarette peaked from his lips, bobbing with impatience. It was obvious that he was a new smoker; his fingernails were clean, and he chewed on the filter more than he smoked.

Early spring bleached the sidewalk, so when the kid approached, his long shadow swallowed him whole. “Hey, Ash,” he said. “Got a cigarette?”

Aslan mumbled something awkwardly then handed him one. The road hummed as a school bus rumbled past, taking with it the screams of impatient high schoolers.

“Did you ask your pops?” The kid asked.

“About what?” Aslan replied.

“About the camp,” he spoke as if he already knew the answer, with enough disappointment but still a tint of hope. “Applications are due at the end of the week, you know.”

Aslan looked to the sidewalk and told it, “Yeah.”

“We could use you. You’re the only other guy who knows this stuff like we do.”

“Ask Bones.”

“Bones is already coming, and you know that he is shit at Physics. You know this stuff. Cain can help, but you know he’s not into the physical sciences. We need you.”

“Alex, my pops isn’t gonna let me skip outta town for three weeks to go to math camp.” His fingers were getting twitchy around the cigarette. “I wish you’d stop asking.”

“Is it the money?” The kid prodded further. “I’m sure you could get a scholarship.”

“It’s not the money,” a sharpness edged his voice.

“Then what is it, the distance? My mom can drive us both to Dallas.”

“I just fucking can’t, alright? I told you to stop asking.” The cigarette went under his foot, smashed into the concrete. “Now lay off.”

“Alright, geez,” the kid looked more annoyed than disappointed. “I just don’t get why you won’t even try. This is a big deal, Ash.”

“It’s fucking math camp.”

“It could mean transferring to Dallas Tech. You could go to college early. Don’t you want to get out of this shit hole?”

Aslan stayed silent.

“Fine,” he put out his own cigarette. “Whatever. Guess I’ll just see you in chemistry, then.”

Aslan entered the school after the bell, and I followed him as he maneuvered through a crowd of teens towards the back end of the building. The school seemed to be under construction, small and in a bit of disrepair, so when he left through a back exit and walked down the ramp towards a portable, I wasn’t surprised.

In the Texas heat, the portable grew excessively muggy, but the kids inside seemed to have long grown impervious to the oppressiveness of it. A fan, large and round, clicked in the corner, and Aslan took his seat near it. His arms, only slightly darkened by a sparse time living under the sun of the American South, glowed yellow against the paneled walls.

On the chalkboard there were rows of simple algebraic equations. As the teacher explained them and expanded the numbers on the board, my brother grew distracted. In his notebook, full of answers but little notes, he scratched a Kilroy with his pencil, and there was enough left of me to smile. I had taught him how to draw those.

Before Aslan, I didn’t need language for what my parents did.

Sometimes, my father got angry. Sometimes, when he had his favorite blue cans and green bottles, he cradled them in his hands like something precious. I didn’t need to know what alcohol was, to understand the necessity of being weary.

Other times, my mother would smoke for an hour in the bathroom, demanding time alone. The smell, sweet and chemically like the cleaners she used on the kitchen floors, made my nose run.

Small town life sheltered what I now know as functional addictions, the socially acceptable kinds like pain killers and alcohol. This ugliness stayed shadowy, lived behind closed doors and bar counters, so worn and tired it got excused for normalcy. When my father drank, he wasn't an alcoholic, only a man who got angry under stress. This was normal, even understandable. "He's stressed," they would say. "He lost his wife, you know," "a man hurts when he can't be a man," blah blah...

Sometimes these things hurt me, or made me sad. But I knew how my parents loved me, and that I loved them, and for awhile that seemed to be enough. As an only child, the world is small and in sets of three; the best but loneliest form of comradery, and it’s way easier to forgive.

The first time I realized my otherness, I was on the early side of twelve. While most little boys got to know their minds and bodies in the privacy of bathrooms, I got educated after Jeffrey Gadden pushed me off the jungle gym and made my knees raw and bloody, sending me straight to the school nurse.

As I waited my turn, I heard her casually mention to a teacher, “Some of these children, they just come in here stinking of cigarettes.” I could feel the three pairs of eyes dart quickly to me, pathetically trying to hide it. “It’s not the children, it’s their parents. But they come in, and you can just smell it on them.”

My little shoulders hunched so high I could disappear into my neck. When the teacher left, the nurse afforded me a sugary-thick smile and asked me to choose between a pair of colorful bandaids. I chose one with a tiger, another with a horse and stars.

After school with a friend, I asked why he wouldn’t come over. His father had a table version of centipede and always bought us pizza, so it was never something I argued, but I wanted to show him the road racing set I had gotten for my birthday. It wasn’t often that I was the one with the cool toys. He shifted uncomfortably before shyly admitting that my house smelled bad.

While I watched Aslan, I thought of moments like these, wondered if he had yet to find language for his situation, if he knew how to interpret it. If he felt as alone and strange and monstrous as I did. These secrets, they’re the stuff you feel everywhere, in every nook of the house. They’re the ghosts who haunt the halls of a sad home.

Behind a sliding shower door, I found my old workplace, where a murder of crows made a habit of gathering on the islands of the 7-Eleven parking lot. In a seminar of black feathers, their croaky voices bleated and carried down Bradford Street. I used to watch them for awhile, studied their wobbly bodies as they fought seagulls for trash and leapt between shopping carts. I liked crows, if only because they were easy to write poetry about.

On Fridays I opened with a guy named Cash, a real talker. I'm a quiet guy, so that suited me something awful, but he did his work and kept to his side of the store. While I prepped the coffee machines and manicured the pastry bins with a menagerie of painted sweets, he sulked in the back hauling boxes to and from the freezer. The earthy aroma of cheap coffee steadily filled the store, then the shop opened.

I went back to the counter and stood, sold a lottery ticket and two dollars worth of donuts. When a guy from the pharmacy across the street came in for a coffee, he paid with a twenty and I fucked up the order on the cash register, returning too many ones. For the hundredth time that day, I called myself an idiot.

Ten minutes later, the bell chimed and a woman walked in. Under her armpit an oxygen tank stuck out, a tube up her nose. The tube at her neck bobbed with each heavy breath, and for a moment, I thought it jutted out of her throat. My eyes darted the room. She pointed to a pack of Pall Malls, and I got them for her. She called herself Pat and came in almost every other day with the exact amount of change. Even with the tobacco teeth, she had a nice smile.

I think this had been the first time I saw addictions in people. These things always stayed invisible in my life, ghosts that crept around kitchens and pleasantly settled into a familiar routine, but never got talked about. Seeing it out in the open, so blatantly obvious, did something to my stomach.

When Alissa came and relieved us for lunch, Cash and I sat behind the store smoking cigarettes. A fresh pack of Marlboros came out and the fullness of the pouch felt pleasantly firm in my hands. Cash asked for one and I gave him a bic lighter.

"Dani and I got the new apartment," he breathed smoke through his nose. The dollar signs tattooed on his knuckles shined in the light of a fresh afternoon, and I had to double take to make sure they were actually there. "We moved in last week."

"Ah," I replied.

He shook an orange bottle to rattle the pills inside. "Want one?"

"No, thanks."

"They give these to me at the clinic."

"You don’t take them?"

"I don't do heroin anymore," he said it like I was an idiot for even asking.

"How did you get it?"

Another dumb question, because apparently I’m an idiot when I don’t know what to say, and he responded in kind by ignoring me.

“This is the 4mm, not the 2mm Freddie sells,” he drawled. “People want this stuff. Dani needs them, but ya know, these babies pay our rent. Condella ain't giving that to me."

I nodded and pretended that I knew who Dani was, while also agreeing that our boss was kind of a prick.

"Do you believe that the boss digs Nixon? Guy is a fucking cocksucker. He won't be so cocky when all of his employees are dead in Nam', you know."

In two months time he would receive his own letter in the mail, which he stared at for a whole two seconds. He knew what to do, had planned for this moment. With purpose he walked down the row of stairs into the complex parking lot, where his truck, wet with sun, waited for him to act.

Opening the door, he closed his eyes, took a deep breath. Children giggled nearby, accompanied by the hollow barking of a dog that droned out into silence. Radio noise leaked from the next door window.

Carefully, he lined up his left arm perfectly with the seam of the car door. He trembled incessantly, tried to find the nerve. One more breath, then with full force, the heavy door broke his arm in half with a sickening crack. That arm would not be the same again, but he never did go to Vietnam.

Talking to him scared me, in the way most things at the store scared me. Adulthood reaped me early, but this was an adulthood I had been sheltered from. This raw, desperate reality of others. My anxiety had trouble processing it, these foreign experiences that I could do nothing about, the unadulterated shame of having been so fucking sheltered. I hated myself, hated my own inconsistency.

My heart clenched whenever my co-workers talked about their lives and never before did I feel so removed from the world, so much like a child. When they asked me about school, I had to reply that I had been out of high school for over a year now. They steadily smiled with a nod I could only interpret as judgement. Everyone could see it, the newness and unflattering fit of my adulthood.

I watched as he popped open the bottle cap and took the pill into his stomach. He hummed, then snapped it back shut. “You know, Alissa is having all of us over after work. You should come hang out.”

Almost, I refused. I told him that my baby brother was going to be busy with baseball practice today, so I could probably go, but I had to think about it. In the end, I went because I didn't want to go home.

David took Cash and I to a small apartment block, where Alissa met us with her boyfriend, a guy named Russell. It was strange, seeing her without the name tag or the poise of a manager, and even stranger to see the home of somebody I only knew the surface of. Awkwardly, I sat on the couch and interacted little, until everyone seemed to get impatient with my sobriety.

"Get a grip," Cash chided. "You're not gonna feel it if you're acting so damn anxious." I looked down at the pipe. It wasn’t so much that I was afraid of getting high as much as I was afraid of losing control, of looking like an idiot.

“You smoke cigarettes,” he continued. “Don’t make this into a big deal.”

I put the pipe between my lips and let him light it. The fresh ember made my throat burn, and my tongue got tinted by something earthy and sweet. Blowing the rest of the smoke through my nose, I softly coughed before handing the pipe back. Then the burn intensified, and I coughed harder.

“Callenreese actually loosened up,” Alissa smiled around her cigarette. “Good for you.”

I didn’t know what else to do so I returned that smile. It helped she was pretty, that the smoke drifted down my veins into the space between my legs.

“I’ve smoked before,” I said, only a partial lie. The first time I smoked weed happened in the school parking lot, after practice with the other kids from theater tech. Yvonne, a girl I sort of had a crush on who also made me a smoker of clove cigarettes, offered me and two others a puff. I accepted, mostly because I wanted to impress her. When I put my mouth on her pipe I could taste the plasticky sweetness of her cheap lipstick, and I remember licking my lips for the rest of the day just to get another hint of her.

I got enough to taste but not enough to get high. Looking back and having the experience I do now, I’m sure everyone noticed, but had the kindness not to say anything. It had been so casual, not so much about getting fucked up as a sort of ritual. This time, I would be getting fucked up.

“Here, these too,” Russell smiled when he removed a bottle from a drawer, and Cash hooted and hollered. “Griff’ gets the ‘ludes first,” he scolded him. “You like these too much.”

He bit a pill right at the divide, crushed it between his teeth, then offered me the rest. I swallowed it, everyone cheered, and the warmth of acceptance hit me harder than the weed.

“So what’s it you do, Griff?” Alissa asked me. Now that I wasn’t the only one sober, everyone in the room became less interested in my sobriety and more interested in my being there.

“Uh,” my thoughts were cloudy and I swallowed into a dry throat. “I don’t know.”

Everyone laughed and I felt like shit, but smiled anyway.

“I mean, there has to be more than work. What do you do for fun? Got a girlfriend?”

“I don’t...” My brain scrambled, desperate to remember anything at all interesting about myself. “I don’t have a girlfriend,” I said, in attempt to bide more time, “but I guess I read a lot.”

Cash or David couldn’t be any less invested in my interests. If Alissa wasn’t, she faked it well and nodded warmly. In my arms and legs I could sense the weed hitting my bloodstream, making everything warm and fuzzy, so I decided to be brave and clarify.

“I have to watch my little brother most of the time,” I told them. “He’s five.”

“That’s cute,” Alissa said. To my relief, she didn’t pry further. “My little sister goes to the Four Cs, she wants to be a nurse. I also went, but only for a semester.” One by one, the bottle of quaaludes made it around the room.

“Whatever,” Cash chided. “I’m bored. We’re playing Ten Fingers.”

“What’s that?” I asked, and everyone laughed at me again.

Some kids care about grades at school. Others care about social grades, the ones that sayhow adult you are. Ten Fingers is a test of the latter kind.

“Have you ever, had sex in a movie theater,” Cash said, smile wry. Everyone giggled and my heart plummeted into my stomach as one by one, fingers began to drop.

“Alissa, why am I not surprised?” Came a voice.

“Stop,” she blushed, then giggled, and my cheeks went hot.

Nobody cares if you’ve ever been out of the country, have tried snowboarding, or got to eat a weird type of food. None of these prove that you are an adult, that you’ve crossed to the other side, where life is more interesting and exciting. The world of young adulthood tallied your adult credibility with the plenitude or lack of sexual experiences.

“Have you ever... been kissed.”

Somehow, I knew that question had been made for me. My unplayed fingers twitched, aware of their stagnancy. I stared, too high to make a face but also high enough to feel a surge of anxiety. I bobbed my finger, trying to make it go down, but I’m a bad liar.

“Really?” David smiled, but I knew he had already known before asking the question. I’d never felt so inadequate and naked in my entire life. But that shame quickly dissipated as the pill filled me with something warm and comforting. Suddenly, I didn’t care. It felt nice not to care.

In two years, David would come home from Vietnam with a box containing a dried ear and a cord of leather strung with human teeth. He would brag about these too, but would die an old man who hid the shame of paying his captain five bucks for them.

“Yeah ...” My tongue slurred, and I laughed at myself with everyone else.

I realized that night how I liked drugs. I _really_ liked drugs.

You hear about it, but in rural Massachusetts, doing drugs made you a bad person. It was something in the movies, something that happened to other people, to people who made mistakes.

Later, I would think about how much life I wasted not doing heroin. Too many mornings I woke up with a headache to make it to the register on Bradford Street. The fridge stayed empty and Aslan had begun to prepare for school, growing fast and needing a new pair of shoes. Too many days were spent making dinners out of jars of peanut butter. Too many days I would think about life, how there were so many things yet not much I could do with any of it. No ending could be seen. Every breath, my heart clenched. My mind wandered.

The heroin made me smile. It made everything beautiful. I had wasted so many years being depressed, I thought, when the cure had been so easily accessible through a needle.

In Vietnam, I would play that game again. When the same questions went around the room, I got a few fingers down. I had done it. It felt different than I thought it would. Nobody seemed to notice the change in me, and I felt no different. Rather, my stomach twisted and ached. In the jungle, everything I had done thus far felt stupid and meaningless. Here I was, sitting in this circle surrounded by boys who made meat out of human beings, giggling about hiring hookers and fucking in the backseat of their high school cars. I just wanted to get high and not think about it.

]

A man with glasses bigger than his face said, “You know, death looks a lot like a door to me, too.”

“I hear it’s pretty common,” I replied. “I recently met a woman who said every door looks like the ones from her childhood home.”

“Okay, but I actually have a story about this,” the guy continued, then waved his arm. “He’s talked enough hasn’t he, Quincy? It’s my turn.”

“Rick, you waited until the god damn 90s to get your leg looked at. You died of _gangrene_ , for Christ’s sake. After the war! I think you can wait for Griffin to finish his story.” He looked at me. “Go on.”

[

In New Orleans, my little brother spun and walked through the rain, Shorter Wong at his side. They shivered and quickened their steps, but wore taut, clean smiles.

On a street of pink and hazy green neon, they picked an aging motel with a sign that could have been replaced ten years ago. The rot-eaten porch creaked as Aslan pulled back the door, stepping from wood to linoleum.

Behind a desk manicured with brochures sat a middle-aged woman who looked way too tired to be there. She watched the pair with lazy eyes until they approached the counter.

Aslan pushed a strand of wet hair away from his eyes. “Uhm,” he said, “can we get a room? With two beds.”

She wordlessly looked from each boy then to the clipboard on her desk, scanning a series of rows with practiced eyes. Nodding to herself, she tapped one of the columns with a pen. “Ten dollars,” she said, then waited for the money.

Shorter’s hand dug into the back pocket of his jeans, only to stiffen. Aslan noticed and stared at his feet, expecting what was to come. He could hear Shorter check each and every pocket, coming up with nothing.

“She swiped your wallet,” Aslan said to the floor.

“Shit!”

The woman stared, neither sympathetic or annoyed. “So, you don’t have the money?”

“Ash,” Shorter looked at my brother in desperation, as if staring hard and long enough would conjure up some kind of solution or epiphany. Aslan only stared in return, then shrugged.

“Goddamn,” he groaned. “This is bad.” Their eyes traveled back to the woman, who simply slouched further into her chair and rolled her shoulders.

Moments later, they were back in the rain. The smiles were gone, replaced by nervous uncertainty.

“Don’t say anything,” Shorter grumbled.

“I don’t have anything to say about it,” Aslan responded. “But I did tell you not to trust a floozy. Only ‘cause it takes one to know one.”

“You’re classier than that.”

“You just don’t know me all that well yet.”

The rain made the neon go hazy. Both boys watched the lights through the rain, and I felt strangely nostalgic. There’s something consistently familiar about colorful streets on a rainy night.

“We can’t stay here,” Aslan said, then restlessly kicked his feet. His shoes were turning cold, wet and heavy. “We better find somewhere to sleep.”

He picked up his backpack and began to walk. Shorter followed behind, still drunk with flavored vodka. His feet seemed to be bothering him, as he ritually shifted from walking on his heels to the balls of his toes.

“There,” he suggested. Aslan looked, glowing blue under the street lights. He shivered, then watched his friend’s finger as it moved to point across the street.

A row of tight French-style townhomes dotted the road, daintily dressed in black iron rails and a canopy of live oak trees. The last home erected a small window awning made of rotting wood, further eclipsed by a large branch draped in Spanish moss. Shorter looked back at Aslan for approval.

“What do you think?” He asked.

“I just want to get off my feet,” came his retort, and there wasn’t much to disagree on, so with careful steps they crept onto the property. The windows were black and lifeless, and with great relief their footsteps failed to trigger any lights. Under the small awning the rain pattered, and the boys kept close. Above them, a pair of wind chimes sang into the rain.

“This sucks,” Shorter laughed, and Aslan snickered in agreement. “I’ll take out a blanket. The Mylar will be okay.”

From his backpack he unfolded a pair of silver squares, and in minutes they were huddling under it, like a pair of children at a sleepover. Shorter lit up his face with a flashlight and scrunched his nose, provoking giggles from my brother.

“It’s like the worst fucking slumber party ever.” Shorter clicked the light on and off, on and off.

“I’ve never been to a sleepover,” Aslan mused, then looked up into the film. “This isn’t as bad as I thought, really.”

“Damn, man. I don’t want to know what you think is actually bad, then.”

Giggling some more, Aslan rested his head on the chest of his friend. Shorter leaned in closer, putting a thick arm around his shoulders. Aslan breathed into the leather, growing warmer, listening to the rain. They wouldn’t have looked out of place in Vietnam.

“Have you ever been in love before?" Aslan asked. His voice got quiet, curious yet strangely vulnerable. Shorter’s face, still illuminated by the yellow of the flashlight, went black at the question.

Click, click. “What?”

“Have you ever been in love before,” he repeated.

“Uh,” Shorter probably thought a question like this should have been easier to answer. His fingers twisted over the body of the flashlight. “No. I don’t think so.”

He looked down at my brother, who stared blankly into the darkness. “Why? Have you?”

It was easy to tell he never thought of Aslan being in love before. His love seemed fleeting and jittery, like a lizard going from rock to rock.

“Yeah,” Aslan sighed, and pushed his body deeper into Shorter’s chest. He listened to his breathing, even and steady. When the flashlight clicked back to life, his fingers gripped the edges of his shirt.

“Do you want to know a secret?” His words, breathy and strange, seemed tinted with a sad sort of urgency.

“Only if you wanna tell me. What is it?”

In the darkness, Aslan’s green eyes glowed like a cat. He stayed silent for a long few minutes, as if trying to convince himself not to say it. Finally, he did. “Every guy I fuck, I imagine it's him."

The silence got thick enough to cut. Shorter swallowed into a throat so dry he couldn’t think of any words. “I'm sorry," he managed.

"In some ways, you remind me of him,” Aslan continued. “Your kindness, mostly." Shorter made a fake groan of displeasure. Aslan giggled, a wonderful sound, and the chill of the awkward confession faded.

"You stink," Shorter teased. “Like a wet dog. You need to get off of me.”

"So do you.” His hands hugged him tighter for effect. “So shut up.” Through laughter, both boys tussled, until Shorter seemed to pause. Leaning into the blanket, he stared off into nothing, until Aslan took notice.

“What’s wrong?” He asked.

Shorter breathed more anxiously. He shut his eyes tight, focusing on something seemingly unpleasant.

“Shorter?”

“Yeah, uh. I...” A hand went through his hair, nervous and shaky. Aslan looked up at him with questioning eyes. “Can I tell _you_ something?”

“Yeah,” Aslan breathed the words into his chest. “Of course.”

A long pause. “Your love question, it just...” his fingers began to tremble. “I’ve never been ‘in love’ before.”

“Okay.”

“But I always hurt the people I do love,” he swallowed. “I hurt them bad, Ash.”

Aslan seemed to think about this. “I’m sure it’s not as bad as you think,” he said.

"I killed my parents." The comment came so suddenly, so carelessly, that his voice almost squeaked. Suddenly, his eyes were familiar to me, that look guilt gives you.

Aslan stared. "What are you talking about?"

"It's my fault they died.” They came as suddenly as the confession, the tears in his eyes. Hard, painful ones. He sniffed, snot stubbornly drooling from his nose. “That truck would have never hit us if it weren't for me."

"Shorter," Aslan began.

"It's true,” Shorter sat up so suddenly, Aslan startled. His eyes were bulbous, ghostly white. “I... I stole money from the till at this restaurant my sister worked at. There were these shoes. These Jordan’s. I really wanted them, I really wanted them, but... my parents found the money.” He exhaled a labored breath, but that didn’t stop the shaking. “They were taking me to return it. It’s my fault. All of it. I killed my parents."

Not seeing the reaction from Aslan that he expected, Shorter’s sounded more desperate to prove himself.

"It's true," Shorter demanded. "Even Nadia doesn't know. She doesn't know how terrible I am, Ash."

"You're not a bad person, Shorter."

"Fuck man, I killed them. I fucking killed them, over a pair of sneakers."

"A mistake doesn't make you a killer."

"Are you really calling this a fucking mistake?"

"I..."

"We were fighting in the car. I was yelling about some bullshit. My pop got distracted."

"Shorter.”

"I can't live with myself, man! How am I supposed to go every day of my life, living with this in my head? To know I caused so much suffering? That I did all of this to myself, to my family?" As if by impulse, he stomped his foot on the concrete, then cried. The rain continued to pour through a long moment of silence.

"You didn't make that driver hit you,” Aslan whispered, and Shorter shut his eyes tight.

"People like patterns. We try to put names and reason to things, but most of the time, the universe just makes shit happen and there is nothing to it. You made a mistake. Some trucker asshole made a bigger one. There's nothing that made anything happen, it just is."

"It's all so stupid, Ash."

"Yeah. But you're not a bad person."

"I made you cry tonight."

"Yeah, so what?" He kicked the blanket and rolled back over to Shorter. "Just ‘cause you got drunk and acted like an asshole, that suddenly makes you some sort of super dick? A killer?" Shorter didn’t answer.

"You know, my brother probably killed people. He was in 'Nam."

He looked right at me, acknowledgement in his eyes.

"Oh...” he replied, not actually responding to Aslan.

"But he never wanted to hold a gun. He was a kind person, who didn't deserve that shit. I miss him."

Shorter had barely rubbed out the snot from his eyes and nose when Aslan kissed him. Sweet and gentle, even instinctual. Aslan playfully licked the top of his nose.

"You know, I’m better than that floozy.” It was soft and joking and a little tinged with laughter, but a seriousness could be felt in it, a comment hazed by mischievous yet troubled eyes.

Death keeps you from helping the people you care about. All I could do was watch as his hand traveled, moving softly to the fuller area of Shorter’s jeans. “I like you, Shorter.”

Another kiss, and Aslan’s fingers crept further, inching like a nervous spider. Then, as suddenly as it began, it stopped. Shorter grabbed his hand, pulled it sharply away.

“You have to stop this,” he demanded.

Aslan stared, as wide-eyed and speechless as a goldfish. He stuttered like a child failing to find his voice.

“Why?” He managed. I could see that his eyes were weak, tired and sad. “We both feel like shit.”

“Because,” Shorter replied. “I won't be somebody else for you.”

It was obvious how quickly he regretted those words. When he released Aslan’s arm, they stared at one another, red-eyed and stunned, until Shorter realized the wet on his cheeks were not from the rain.

“He made me a person, Shorter,” my brother said, then finally allowed himself to cry about a boy.

_____

I’ve seen people kill just because they wanted to shoot somebody. Bootcamp made kids into killers by pumping their blood full of fear, and the jungle made them apathetic through exhaustion and the freedom of anonymity. What society told us back home, it didn’t matter when you’re eighteen, in a foreign country and have a gun. For some, it became an excuse to get away with things, to let out steam. Nobody back home would know or care.

You never really know what people are thinking, or even what they’re like. Abraham Dawson seemed harmless enough. Short, BCGs and stark red hair, he looked more out of place than I did, but at first we got along well enough. He had heard of Walt Whitman and other poets I liked, and for the first time I got to talk to someone about things I actually cared about.

Abraham and I partnered up with two other guys, who I quickly got to know. It’s hard for me to fit in, to find people I can drop my shyness around. But these guys were willing to be patient with me, to show me the ropes, and I figured back home and out of uniform they were just as awkward as I had been.

On the second week of my deployment, the four of us left with a small regiment to patrol a US-sanctioned camp north of the delta. It was quite a walk, and even with the training from bootcamp my legs weren’t prepared for this sort of terrain. My feet got stuck in the muck, my thighs rubbed raw, and I spent a good hour peeling sheets of dry skin off my feet.

My helmet and fatigues belonged to another guy who, but two weeks before I arrived, found himself blown into a tree. Abraham said he flew, perched on a heavy branch like a bird with his ass up in the air. He seemed clean from behind, until the soldiers circled the tree and found a giant hole where his neck and torso used to be.

Maybe what happened next was revenge. I’ll never know. You don’t know what actually lives inside of people.

The camp seemed eerily lifeless, even with people out and about, so somebody had most likely seen us coming. The homes made of cardboard and tin grew in stacks like a tower of rot-eaten matchboxes, and I swallowed into my throat at the squalor of it. These people, they were under our protection, expecting us to keep them out of the war. This didn’t seem much better.

A soldier I didn’t know stood outside a tin shack, m16 at his chest. He called us over.

“We’ve already checked most of them,” he said. “They’ve got their IDs.”

“Don’t mean they aren’t VC,” Abraham replied.

“Well, you’re taking over watch, so that’s your responsibility to figure out now.”

When our arrival became old news, the occupants of the camp returned to their daily lives. A flock of chickens and ducks clucked and picked at the ground, fluttering in the dirt while we smoked our cigarettes. They were hand-rolled and shoddy, and I had to use my fingernails to keep the tobacco properly inside.

Nearby, a family cautiously re-emerged from their tin home. An aging woman with peppery hair helped an armless old man to a makeshift chair, before retrieving a bowl of some type of broth from a small child. I watched as she fed him, every movement careful and full of tenderness, then spied a mother and her child tending to a crass garden of yams and cassava.

One of the guys snorted in disgust, followed by Abraham’s groan of impatience. The day continued to only get hotter and muggier, the boredom turning thick as the heat. A chicken squawked and pecked near Abraham’s foot, and he swatted it away before growing a mischievous grin.

“Guys,” he said, “How about some target practice?” His gun clicked as he rose to his feet. “These fucking birds are driving me batty.”

I quickly stood up.

“What an eager beaver, Griff’. You going first?”

“Don’t do that,” I said. He rolled his eyes.

“You have two seconds to give me something else to do,” he popped in the magazine. My mouth barely twitched before he aimed and fired. The chicken, beak scanning the dirt, exploded into a mess of white feathers. A woman screamed, a child squealed, and another gun went pop pop pop. The men around me laughed as the birds flopped lifelessly to the ground.

The woman in the yam field raised her hoe in the air and screamed something in Vietnamese. We looked between us, then at a guy named Garvey, who knew bits of Vietnamese and at least a handful more of French. As if in response to her hoe, he waved his gun and yelled back in a cacophony of French and pidgin Vietnamese.

She came closer, and the men in my group turned stiff, their guns ready.

“Chicken all we have!” She cried. “We have ID.”

It took the sound of only one bullet for others to follow. The woman, the child, the armless man and the old lady, collapsed into heaps on the ground. The air turned so thick with orange dust and screams that I grew dizzy.

On the child they found a small gun, plastic and green, like one I bought for Aslan once at the 7-Eleven. Command documented it in a photo, labeled the kills as VC casualty. I threw up.

“Shit!” Abraham screamed. “That crazy bitch!”

A week later, after failing to pretend to sleep, I left my tent and met Max Glenreed. His genuine kindness surprised me, but kept me on my toes. My trust in people had grown weary and nervous.

He liked to read, and we waxed about poetry on some of the more monotonous days when our blood ran thick with beer and coffee. I told him the story of my grandmother, and he became the first to hold onto every word and care.

‘Life is hard for immigrants, huh,’ he said.

‘We’re doing the same stuff,’ I murmured, and there came the itchy sensation that only goes away when you’ve finally procured a high.

He told me how he wanted to be a cop. I joked that I wouldn’t judge him too harshly for it.

“Are you ever afraid of getting to know someone?” I asked.

“What do you mean?”

“Like... you’re afraid of being disappointed.”

“Sure,” Max said. “But life is better without expectations. People are going to disappoint you, no matter what.”

Never had I hated my father so much, as the day when we buried my mother. He cried and made his face heavy with tears and snot.

All thirteen years of me stood in the parlor, stiff and enraged. He caused this, made my mother spiral, and I wanted him to follow through with what he had started when he gave another woman his child.

Everything he did, and he could not commit to his actions. How dare he cry and claim to feel the same as I did. I knew and understood disappointment.

But I didn’t want to know if Max could be like those boys. If he could make a harmless old man choke on his blood, if he could disappoint me. I don’t think I could have handled that kind of sadness.

_______

By morning, my brother had needed to pee for two hours. Shrugging off the Mylar and the arm of his sleeping friend, he walked towards the side alley, everything in his body tired and sore. The morning was fair, and the faint sun felt good, but after an emotional night and a painful bladder, Aslan looked visibly skittish.

He unzipped his pants and willed himself to pee. A bit of urine managed to come out, and with effort he forced himself through the pain. Situating himself, he attempted again, then noticed the pair of sparkling eyes in the window above. Blood cold and humiliated, he quickly turned away.

"Shit, shit!” He stuffed himself back into his pants and hurried to the other side, hoping to get Shorter up and going before they had to face the owner of the house. Before he could even get a word out, the door creaked open.

Shorter, half-conscious under the space blanket, blinked wearily before facing the door with alarm. “Oh, shit—“

A woman emerged from inside. She looked almost like a colorful bird, her coppery skin draped in a blissfully creative and colorful Bohemian blouse. On her head a shawl painted in blue galaxies with stars kept her hair tied back, and she adjusted it as she stepped onto the porch.

"Were you boys sleepin' out here?” She demanded an answer, but her voice lacked any malice. Aslan and Shorter seemed to sense this, as their shoulders slackened. Instead of fearful, they now looked terribly sheepish.

"We can move," Shorter suggested.

She stared for a moment, as if studying them up and down. Finally, she scolded, “So you can find yourself a far less friendly stoop to bum off of? Get your asses in here, it’s gonna rain again later, you know that?” Grumbling, she turned around and walked back inside.

Shorter did not need an excuse to get off the porch. He nearly bounced to his feet, gathering their things in a single swoop, then motioned for Aslan to follow. Aslan hesitated, obviously uncertain, but slowly slipped in after him.

The sweet, earthy aroma of Frankincense and sandalwood permeated the home. Shorter sneezed and wiped his runny nose with a sleeve, then looked towards the kitchen when a shrill yap and a pattern of tiny claws pattered again the wood floor.

“Hush, hush,” came the woman’s voice, and a small black dog made itself known, it’s stubby tail wiggling in excitement.

“Don’t be scared of that one,” she stated. Her hands held a fresh box of cigars, and she placed them on a side table, right beside a recliner wrapped in painted cloth. “She just gets excited.”

“Hi there,” Shorter smiled, then pet the squirming little dog. Meanwhile, Aslan studied the house with great interest.

Aslan once slept with a hippie who kept his apartment smoky with incense and covered all his walls in patterned sheets. This home felt familiar in that way, only lived-in and pleasant. Artwork, every one containing a world of its own, covered the walls. Paper masks, paintings made from beads and cloth, hand-dyed tapestries, statues wrapped in feather boas, a menagerie of crucifixes carved from every imaginable material, these things made this home a museum of beautiful oddities.

On a window sill, a taxidermy pine marten started back at Aslan with bared, little yellow teeth and shiny marble eyes. He studied it curiously, then gave into his curiosity by cautiously petting the soft fur of its snout. Glass bottles surrounded the creature as if they were tiny worshippers, stuffed full of stones, shells and porcupine needles, and in the window light they sparkled in a magical way.

With careful hands he touched the end of one of the quills, somewhat surprised when it dully pressed into the pad of his finger. He turned around to face the woman, who had begun to prep her cigar.

“Can I sit?” Aslan whispered.

“Put down a towel first. You’re drying off before you sit on my couch.”

As Shorter and Aslan obliged, she sat in the corner loveseat and propped up the recliner. Readying the fat cigar, she lit it.

Aslan grimaced. They did not smell like that man’s had, but the familiar sweet yet bitter scent made his nose tighten.

Holding his nose, he slumped to the floor and began to remove his shoes. When they were off, followed by his socks, he stared down at his feet and ankles as if looking at something strange and foreign. Shorter gaped. Red, scabby and swollen, they looked like raw snakeskin.

"Those don't look good, child," the recliner creaked as she moved to get a better look.

“I’m fine,” He murmured, but even my usually confident brother didn’t sound so sure.

“You hurting?"

Shorter looked at Aslan, who flushed a little red.

“A little,” he admitted.

"You’re damn filthy, you know that?” Smoke blew through her nose.

Aslan grumbled back, “No.”

“You probably got yourself an infection,” she stared down at his feet. “And is not gonna get any better if keep goin’ around stinking." She looked at Shorter. "That goes for you, too."

"Yes, ma'am,” came Shorter’s sheepish reply .

“It’s Mrs. Mira. Now, you,” she pointed a strong finger at Aslan. “Get your ass down the hall and clean up.”

Aslan looked unsure, even a little unnerved.

Shorter asked for him. “Does the door have a lock?”

“What you need a lock for?”

“Ash gets a bit nervous around people.”

She thought about this for a moment, then nodded to herself. “It’s got a lock.”

Aslan didn’t seem thrilled, but on wobbly feet, he treaded slowly towards the hall. He stopped once to glance back at Shorter, who urged him on.

When the door closed then clicked, Mira leaned back into her chair with a slow creak. “So, you got ghosts?" She mused.

Shorter paused from scratching the dog’s head to look up at her. “What?”

"I can hear them, following you around. That one." She pointed at me.

"Ah,” Shorter wasn't sure what to say. He never had his ghosts validated before. "I dunno, man. They're just kinda there. They don't bother me, really."

She puffed her cigar. “You're too young to be wrapped up with ghosts."

He wasn't going to argue how no one is ever too young to die. “Not really."

"You must be holding onto something. You gotta move on. Start looking for other things.”

Shorter shrugged. “Maybe.”

For a good half hour, Shorter waxed their adventures; how he found Ash at a truck stop, about the beautiful strangeness of the country they all lived in, how in a little over a week’s time he would be at his sister’s wedding.

“I’m glad to hear you have a place to go,” Mira said, in between getting three cups of tea. She ground the mint herself, adding them to the teabags. “That one, though...” She motioned towards the hall and shook her head.

When she returned to the living room with three steaming cups, the bathroom door squealed, followed by slow and careful steps. The smell of soap accented the frankincense and mint as Aslan emerged.

"Wow, look at you! You sure clean up nice "

Soft and relieved, he replied, “Thank you.”

She smiled. “You're welcome."

Aslan sat besides Shorter, who had the dog sprawled at his hip. She had her little paws up in the air, exposing a soft white belly and the tiny knob of her tail.

“You know,” Mira blew smoke through her nose, then leaned in to get a closer look at the boys. “There’s a story about that dog. You like stories?”

“I like stories,” Aslan said. “I read all the time.” Shorter shrugged, ambivalent.

“Well,” she grinned, “I used to have a cat. One day, I’m at the market, looking to bring home some fish for dinner. I’m about to get some catfish, when I notice a pair of green eyes. It takes me a moment to realize these eyes belong to cat, fur black as night.

And what do you know, that cat is standing on his hind legs with a slice of fresh tuna in one paw. I must not have interested him terribly, because he gobbled it up before exclaiming, clear as me, “The King of Cats is dead!”

“This is a weird story,” Shorter murmured. “Cats don’t talk.”

“Hush,” she warned. “So, the cat washes his whiskers, makes his fur nice and clean, then runs off with his rump in the air. A chorus of cats followed after, chanting in repetition, ‘The King of Cats is dead!’” She spread out her arms. “Well, I thought that was the strangest damn thing I’d ever seen. I return home with my fish, where I tell my husband—rest his soul— about my very odd errand. That’s when my own cat suddenly springs up and tells me, ‘I am now The King of Cats!’ The damn cat then flew up the chimney, never to be seen again.”

“Uhm,” Aslan looked amused, but confused. “What does that have to do with the dog?”

“My husband looked at me and said, ‘Mira, guess this means, we need to get ourselves another cat.’ I decided I had enough of cats, I got us a dog.”

The three of them laughed in unison. Mira looked pleased and warm as she put out her cigar, snuffing it in the ashtray. “That’s what I like to see. Smiles. Now hurry up and drink your tea.”

The following morning, over a hearty breakfast of eggs and bacon, Aslan could smell the distinct earthiness of herbs. At the counter Mira procured a variety of sprigs and flowers, measuring each one carefully before putting them into a mortar. The sound of the grinding pleasantly resonated through the kitchen.

“What are you making?” Shorter asked, ever curious. He had already gotten through half of his breakfast, impressed by the thick slabs of bacon Mira’s neighbor tinted with applewood.

“A balm for your friend’s ankles, it should help with the pain,” she explained. “But what you should really be doing is getting your ass to a doctor. I'll even take you."

Aslan turned a bit pale, staring at his runny eggs. “No doctors,” he said.

She looked at him hard, put her hands on her hips. “I don’t know if I’m giving you a choice.”

“Then I’ll run away.” He said it so simply, he seemed to even surprise himself. With slow hands, he returned to cutting his eggs, and Mira sighed.

As the boys got ready to leave, Mira met them by the door. She handed Aslan a jar full of the balm, then a small fabric bag. The bag felt soft but full. Rubbing his fingers over it, he could sense the stone and herb fragments inside. A lynx with bright green eyes looked back at him from the fabric, simple but lovingly painted.

“To protect you,” she said. “Keep it close.”

“Thank you,” He whispered . “But I don’t really believe in this stuff. All magic that’s real, it’s never any useful.”

“You don’t have to believe,” she replied. “It’s only something to hold onto. So you know somebody is thinking about you. Sometimes that’s all the magic you need.”

Aslan thought about that for a moment, then nodded.

“What about me?” Shorter asked. “Don’t I get any protection?”

“Boy, you don’t need protecting. You need to get your head out of your butt.” She smiled when Shorter hunched his shoulders high. “But, I’ll do you one better.” Removing a wallet from the pockets of her dress, she licked her finger, tore a check, then wrote a number with two zeroes.

“Don’t be stupid with it,” she warned, then hugged them goodbye.

_________

  
When you’re faced with death on the daily, you can get over most things quickly. We buried five guys that day, when a mortar hit a nearby camp. One GI lost a leg up to his knee, and I watched as it sunk into the mud before some kid from rural Kentucky wrapped it up in butcher paper. Now his blood turned stale under our nails while we sat around a fire pit, laughed and got drunk.

At the back of camp a group gathered, daring a willing few to try the new drug of the day. A handful of curious spectators stayed to watch and see what would happen.

Amphetamines and alcohol got supplied to us by the government. More than we could ever chew or drink, enough to impress even the son of an alcoholic. This was our prescription for cold feet. Scared? Here’s your medicine. That night, my field officer filled a needle with black tar. Alcohol never did anything for me.

I asked what he was doing when he readied a paper bag, and he told me not to worry about it. After the needle went into my arm, I puked into it and everyone laughed. Then, I experienced the most delicious of feelings, and I understood what Max meant when he said heroin felt like an orgasm a thousand times over.

I learned where and how to buy my own, and paid a Vietnamese lady 2 USD a day for it. The medicine kept me numb. No longer did the jungle seem scary. In fact, at times it could even be beautiful. I didn’t care about dying, no longer cried about my baby brother. For the first time since I was a child, I felt peace.

Even in death, I still love heroin.

“The loneliest thing in the world is missing somebody who is still right beside you,” Max told me one night.

“What poet is that?” I asked, and he smiled at me sadly. I didn’t understand what he meant at the time...

If I have to talk about my death, I have to talk about the mud.

I lay in it, the orange muck, until the last bits of myself drifted away through the haze of heroin that got shot up my right foot. I could still feel the holes that littered my toes and fingers, the new ones in the leg and right big toe, the collapsed vein in my arm that kept seasoned by rows of peppery red dots.

I looked up at Max and whispered, “There’s a hole in my chest,” then I died.  
  


________

In Texas, Aslan was all nerves. The day before a teacher called their apartment, requesting a meeting to speak with him and his parents. His stomach flipped, his nerves were on fire, and waiting for the man who would be accompanying him made the anxiety worse.

He looked up when footsteps approached.

“Ash,” he said. In his hands a cigar smoked, and it grew near enough to the butt that he discarded it. “I hope I didn’t get dragged out here because you fucked up.”

Aslan stayed silent.

“Let’s get this over with.” He snuffed the butt into the concrete, then followed Aslan inside. They met the teacher in the same portable from earlier that day, and the man looked around him with obvious distaste.

Aslan looked uncomfortable, almost as if he would blend into the wall if he tried hard enough. I stood behind him and he seemed to slightly relax.

“I’ve been talking to his other teachers, and we think Aslan would do well skipping a grade,” the teacher explained. “He's always bored in class.”

The man glanced at Aslan, who only stared at the toes of his Chuck Taylors. He seemed to be thinking about what to say, but looked visibly nervous. The teacher looked at him with such empathetic eyes that I liked her immediately.

“He wrote a story,” she continued, “quite an impressive one.”

The classroom permeated with silence, until the man lit another cigar. Sweet, bitter earth smokily filled the portable, until finally, he spoke. “We're moving next month.”

Disappointment overwhelmed the teacher's face. "I see."

"I got a new job."

The teacher seemed to think about what to say. “Aslan is leaving in the middle of the school year? There’s no way that he can finish?”

“No. We need to be in Pennsylvania by the 15th,” he made the cigar glow, and Aslan couldn’t tell if it was the smoke making his eyes water. “Is that all you called me out here for?”

“Your son is extraordinarily gifted,” she said, but her voice sounded weaker and less sure now. “I only want to see him succeed.”

“What he can do here, he do there,” looking to Aslan for a verbal agreement, he cleared his throat when there wasn’t any. “Now, if that’s all, we need to get going. Aslan still had his gaze attached to the floor. “Let’s go.”

As they exited the portable, Aslan glanced back at the teacher, before he left the room and her forever. In five days they would be back in the northeast, where the ground still lay wet with snow.

Their first morning in Pennsylvania, a second blanket of white covered the town, empty and desolate as the one Aslan left, only now he was alone again. Most places looked different, but internally they were all the same. When he started at his new school, he would see the same people who were in Texas; the same social orders, kids with the same interests and the same problems. What differentiated each of these worlds of young adulthood were the new names and a different coat of paint. The only outlier was him.

He went for a walk in the snow, studied the heavily frosted branches that stretched like fingers, watched the perfectly clean hills glow in the sun.

Applications for STEM camp were due today. If he imagined hard enough, he could see Alex and the rest of them excitedly preparing. His stomach twisted. Next to a street sprinkled with the red of trespassing signs, he saw a plant, leaves still tinged with green as it struggled for life.

Breathing smoke from his mouth into the cold air, he continued down the road. I followed. I’ll follow as long as I need to.

]

I straightened up in my seat. The eyes in the room watched me as Brown thought about what to say.

“Are you going to keep reliving these experiences in your life? Continue following your brother?”

“I don’t know. Aslan seems to be doing better, I don’t know if he needs me anymore,” I stared at my hands, still covered in plagues of orange mud. “Maybe I’m scared of leaving everything behind.”

“Death is a scary thing.”

“I think, this is the first time I’ve really had any control over my life,” I admitted. “Moving onto something new means losing control all over again.”

“That’s how things are, unfortunately for us.” He took out a pack of cigarettes and lit one. The smoke didn’t smell, but the ember glowed between his teeth. “Just have to see what’s next. That’s all we can do.”

The door I came in from had shrunk into a common, paneled townhouse door. I stood, looking from it to my audience.

“Here,” Brown handed me a cigarette, then lit it. Smoking it felt good, but different from what I remembered. “Don’t know what you’ll find through there, but you’re free to come back anytime.”

I smoked for a few minutes, thinking, listening to the beginning of the next story. An old man weaved a tale about his granddaughter, told a story about pushing her on a swing set on Thanksgiving. I stared down at the cigarette in between my fingers, and thought about all the lives I could have lived. Then I crushed the filter, touched the doorknob and turned.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is a one chapter thing, next chapter will return to third person.
> 
> I originally wrote this in third person, but as it is from Griffin’s perspective, and much what he talks about goes back and forth between life and death, third person just.. didn’t feel right. In first person, I felt the writing more accurately reflected his feelings and his connection with his brother. The sudden departure in structure is also supposed to be jarring, as Griffin is telling his story from the dead. He is technically not part of the narrative

**Author's Note:**

> I really have nothing against the Bee Gees, I swear.
> 
> Anyway, the plot bunnies hit me. Let me know what you think! Looking forward to taking these two across America.


End file.
